Let's Fight (our) Mediocrity, One Round at a Time!
Already vacation deprived, a particularly stressful summer at work added to my chronic wanderlust. It is fair to say, that I barely ever felt so in need of a vacation. Looking for the perfect destination for an adventure holiday, we settled for the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, the self-proclaimed happiest place on earth. As our visit in August fell in the middle of the Monsoon season, would rain clouds get in the way of our soul search?
It has been a while since I published a full-length Life-Sparring round. My excuse? Stress! The perfect opportunity to take a closer look at my strange relationship with one of the strangest side-effects of our modern lifestyle.
Life-Sparring is all about the exchange of ideas and concepts to optimize life in all aspects.
Creative ideas come especially handy when life throws some lemons at you. Being out of work is a such a test, especially in Hong Kong where you do not enjoy unemployment benefits like in Europe and even more if you have a family to care for and a mortgage to pay. A good friend of mine, JB, just recently was in this exact situation.
What impressed me immediately when talking job search with JB, was his positive energy and his unique approach to the existential challenge. An approach that not only proofed to be successful for JB but is also replicable by other job searchers for a wide range of positions. It was an absolute no-brainer to ask JB if he would be interested in sharing his job hunting strategy in a Life-Sparring round and luckily, he agreed.
Enter JB Deal, the master of what I call “the deal making approach to job hunting”!
Despite being occasionally whiny about my genetical uphill battle when it comes to athletic performance and body composition, I enjoy a reasonable bill of health and my life in general. This, however, does not stop me from occasionally thinking about death and I think you should do so too. Read to hear why!
While in recent years I mostly read nonfiction, I strongly believe that novels can be just as powerful when it comes to broadening the horizon and understanding the big picture.
I think that to understand the world, our history, even contemporary and future developments, it takes both, reading history books for a factual framework and reading novels to get a feeling for the zeitgeist.
While the origin of my life-long interest in Asia will likely stay a mystery forever, I know for sure that there are a few brilliant books that shaped this interest. Among the many I want to highlight five that stood out in particular.
The quest to understand the roots of my appalling running performance is an ongoing topic of this blog. In two previous Life-Sparring rounds I looked at possible reasons like age and weight and my running form. In this article I dive deeper, literally going more than just skin-deep, doing a professional athletic fitness assessment at the Institute of Human Performance of the University of Hong Kong. If you are a regular reader, you can imagine that it was a humbling experience with a lot of insights.
About four years ago I started to show severe signs of getting addicted to a popular mobile phone game. After reaching a point where playing the game began to disrupt parts of my life, I made a rather radical decision: I deleted all games from my phone and decided to get my fix from something much more productive, a flashcard game to learn Chinese. Interested to hear how that worked out?
Tired of gaining weight despite a high level of physical activity, I decided to pull the nuclear option and go on a full-blown ketogenic diet. As there are a lot of useful resources on ketosis, but not many detailed jargon-free reports for beginners, I tried, to sum up the experience of my first week on the keto diet in this article. Enjoy!
Today’s Life-Sparring round is all about Bagel. No, I don’t mean the dry stepbrother of the doughnut, but another ambitious Kickstarter project I backed last year. The Korean team of Bagel Labs promised nothing less than "The World's Smartest Tape Measure". Does the sleek looking Bagel device live up to that promise?
