Let's Fight (our) Mediocrity, One Round at a Time!
Life-Sparring.com was born exactly five years ago! After half a decade of blogging and sparring it is about time to review if Life really gets better with Life-Sparring!
Some articles age like milk, others age like fine wine. Here are five articles from the first five years of Life-Sparring.com that aged like George Clooney, absolutely gracefully.
Five years around this time of the year, I worked on the first articles to publish on Life-Sparring.com. Time to look back on half a decade as an ambitious blogger and share my most valuable advice: “write shitty first drafts!”
WFH is possibly the acronym of 2020, but WOFH (Working Out From Home) became a thing too. With all gyms closed in Hong Kong over the summer, due to the “Third Wave” of COVID-19, I was looking for an addition to my rooftop gym and fell for a product I saw on an Instagram ad: a waterfilled “sandbag”.
In Spring 2017, I wrote an article about my first experiment with the Keto Diet. "Going all Keto" is to date one of the most read articles on Life-Sparring.com. While my body composition improved a bit since 2017, my weight sadly crept all the way back up over the years, reaching old heights. Time to revisit the Keto diet! So here we Goose again!
One of my LinkedIn contacts recently tagged one of his posts with “Daydreaming, after all, is just a form of planning.” When I saw this line, I knew it was the missing piece for this article that I have been pondering over for quite a while. As it turns out, I have without knowing prior to writing this article, practiced what NYU Professor of Psychology Gabriele Oettingen calls “Mental Contrasting for Goal-Fulfillment.”, a framework to tap into daydreams for motivation and more productivity.
Being a business' general manager is a lot, like being the coach of a football club. You put the best team together that you can afford; you do what you can do to make them play (work) well together; you motivate, coach, troubleshoot, and eventually, you take responsibility for the results.
Because of these similarities, it is pretty natural to look to successful sports coaches as role models for leadership. Jürgen Klopp is without a doubt one of the most successful coaches in football and I believe there are a few good reasons why this is the case. Hear me out!
In the eye of giant issues like a global pandemic, social injustice, institutional racism, or climate change, it is easy to feel powerless. It seems that our voices, even our votes do not matter. We are all just small potatoes.
And it is true; it is unlikely that any of us will cause a revolution or change the course of the world significantly. But it would be too easy and convenient to give up and accept everything around us as it is. In many ways, we are powerless and yet powerful.
For the past four and a half years, the tagline below my blog’s logo read “Sparring for Life, Career and Happiness.”
From the moment where I came up with the term Life-Sparring, I loved it. It is catchy; I could register the domains, and even more critical, it accurately expressed what the idea of the blog was all about: bringing the concept of Sparring from martial arts into the broader context of Life.
My relationship with the subtitle has been more ambivalent. It was the best slogan I had been able to come up with when I was designing the website. So it was about time for an update.
