Life-Sparring.com went live on October 22, 2015, when I published the inaugural article “Life gets better with Life-Sparring – Put your gloves on!”.

The motivation to start the blog was fueled by my post-MBA blues, a phase where I was missing the constant challenge, feeling of self-improvement, and constructive feedback I enjoyed so much during the two-year-long MBA journey. Instead, I was stuck in a job with not much chance to grow.

Life-Sparring was meant as a vehicle to push me out of my comfort zone, the same way that physical Sparring did in my Muay Thai training.

From the beginning, the term Life-Sparring felt like much more than just a matching name for the blog I wanted to start. It felt like the perfect short description of my approach to life.

I remember how surprised I was that nobody ever had made that connection, and all domains were still available.

Life-Sparring with Consistency

A lot of things have changed since 2015. I got married, switched jobs twice, bought a house, and moved to the Hong Kong countryside. Life-Sparring remained a constant in my life.

Except for a few quiet periods, I have been blogging fairly consistently. But much more than that, I have been practicing Life-Sparring, challenging myself outside of my comfort zone, almost every single day.

Over the past half a decade, Life-Sparring has become a big part of my identity. I guess I have turned into “That Life-Sparring Guy,” to the extent that I annoy some of my friends.

Except for some early moments of virality following a product review of a popular Kickstarter product Travelling with (and without) the “World’s best Travel Jacket, Life-Sparring.com has been attracting a steady but moderate stream of visitors. Till today, the blog is still only sparsely monetized, and I continue to support my passion project with a few hundred US$ a year.

This amount and time invested in the project are, without a doubt, the best investment I have ever made.

Over the past five years, Life-Sparring has been a continuous source of motivation to fight my mediocrity, pushing me to become the best version of myself.

I am without a doubt still an ongoing work in progress, but not once for the past five years, have I felt stagnant and stuck.

After five years, I can say with absolute conviction: Yes, Life gets better with Life-Sparring! You should really give it a try!

A lot of Reasons to be Grateful! Thank You!

An Anniversary like this is always also a time to thank everyone who has supported me and my crazy idea over the past five years.

First, there is my wife. I would not say that she was on board immediately. The whole idea of the blog seemed somewhat preposterous to her. In the meantime, she has come somewhat around, possibly just accepting that there could be worse ways her husband could spend his spare time than blogging. There have been even a few Life-Sparring rounds where she was actively involved, for example, assisting with photography.

There is also a whole bunch of very loyal friends who have supported me all the way. I do not call anyone out here in person, but you guys (and ladies) know who are, and I assure you, I could not appreciate your support more and cherish every single one of your likes, comments, shares, and corrections.

Collaboration articles are a lot of work, but even more fun, and more importantly, they add perspectives to the blog in addition to my own. Thank you, JB Deal, for generously sharing your experiences and ideas already twice, once in 2017, in the “Deal Making Approach to Job Hunting” and another time earlier this year in “Getting to the Heart of the Deal.”

A massive shoutout goes out to all subscribers to the newsletter, to around 500 fans on Facebook, and more than 300 followers on LinkedIn. I am incredibly grateful to all of you! There is no better motivation to write than knowing that there are some subscribers out there.

And in the case that you have ever wondered who reads articles on Life-Sparring.com, the readership demographics over the past five years has been very stable. Most visitors of Life-Sparring.com have been male (around 60%), in their mid-twenties to thirties (37%), and from the US (42%).

Despite the very US heavy in the readership, Google analytics registered sessions from 158 different countries and territories, including Greenland, Palestine, South Sudan, and Timor-Leste over the past five years. While I have no idea how many of these sessions mark a person reading a full article, it is still a beautiful thought to imagine that the concept of Life-Sparring has reached almost every corner of this very planet.

After five years of blogging, I believe more than ever, that the desire to become the best possible version of yourself is pretty much universal. Promoting the idea of Life-Sparring as a pragmatic way of getting better at being yourself, will be the goal for the next five years.
I’ll hope you join and keep Life-Sparring with me!