For quite a while I was nurturing the idea of a blog.

Graduating from my part-time MBA degree last year, I have significantly more “disposable time” in 2015 than in the two previous years. At the same time, I miss some aspects of the MBA program dearly, especially the feeling of constantly evolving and learning and the immensely productive feedback from my peers.

A blog seemed to be the perfect way to turn excess free time into meaningful interaction with other professionals, incentivizing myself to be more stringent with my very own Tim Ferriss-style experiments to improve my mediocre self.

While I had a pretty clear idea of the range of topics I wanted to cover, one important thing was missing: the name of the blog, the thread to tie it all together.

The inspiration finally came, when I had my first light sparring session in years, over at my local kickboxing gym. Life-Sparring.

Life-Sparring, admittedly a strange word combination, expresses just exactly what I want to achieve with this blog. Just like sparring in the boxing context, I hope to test my acquired skills, knowledge and ideas on a wide range of topics with other interested individuals.

Just like sparring in the ring, I hope that Life-Sparring provides an intense exchange, producing food for thought for everybody involved.

As the arena of life is so much larger than a boxing ring, there is plenty of space for more than just two sparring partners and a wide range of subjects.

I will start this blog off with blog posts, each covering one concept, idea, or thought at a time. I will roughly aim to post one blog entry per week.

Topics that I plan to touch on with the blog posts are #productivity, #career, #living in Asia, #quantified self, #self-improvement, #meditation, #happiness and #health.

In the medium term, depending on the reactions to the blog, there might be a change to the format towards more interactive forms of communication. We’ll see! The idea of Life-Sparring is definitely an experiment that can develop in very different directions.

So let’s put our metaphorical gloves on and start Life-Sparring. Let’s keep it light, fair and playful, and build a creative productive learning environment for everyone.