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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: Happiness
Why We Still Pay For Health Insurance In Full For Every Employee
Last month I had a dentist appointment. The dental hygienist – who I’ve known for my entire life – was asking me how business was and we eventually got on the topic of health care costs. I mentioned that our plan was being canceled and we had to pick a new plan for 2013. After quite a bit of research we were able to find a pretty good new plan. Of course, it’s still significantly more expensive than the old plan and has significantly worse coverage. Since we set up our health insurance in early 2007, costs per employee have … Continue reading
Monday as a Measure
Steve over at Nerd Fitness wrote a great post last Monday entitled Always Dominate Monday: I challenge you today to start looking at Mondays differently. It’s not the start of a long week. It’s not the worst day of the week. Monday is the most important day of the week, so do it right: Plan out your meals for Monday on Sunday night. Where, when, and what will you eat? Can you prepare any of that the night before? Plan out your workouts for the week, and put them in your calendar. How many sets, reps, what time, and where. … Continue reading
On Working From Home For Long Stretches
This Saturday we’re (finally) launching the new LockerPulse. Thus far in 2012 my partners and I have had very unusual schedules. With Reece coming on in January, Greg needed to spend almost every day working with him face to face on mastering our customer service processes. Mike and I needed to spend as much time developing LockerPulse so that the project didn’t drag on for a year. In some ways this worked out perfect: Greg spent almost every day in the warehouse with the guys while Mike and I each worked from home. About once per week we’d work together. … Continue reading
Five Lasting Impressions of “The 4-Hour Workweek” as it’s Five-Year Anniversary Approaches
A quick Google search will reveal that Tim Ferriss is quite the controversial character. He’s generally either loved or hated. I personally am in the minority in that I’m square in the middle. Tim has lots of interesting ideas, thoughts, experiments, and experiences. A lot of his ideas are also ridiculously embellished or downright implausible, and he is an endless self promoter. For this post though, we’re going to focus on the positive. It’s crazy to think, but it’s been almost five years since The 4-Hour Workweek was released in April of 2007. I remember seeing it promoted on some … Continue reading
Trading Hours
@DHH wrote a really interesting blog post yesterday about what he calls “flipping the day“: Most days I work from 1pm to 9pm here in Spain, which translates to 6am to 2pm Chicago time. That gives me all the time before lunch to enjoy the light of day and all the activities that encourages. I find myself more interested in working out, more eager to read books, and generally infused with more energy for both physical and mental activities. Over the past few years my average sleep schedule has been roughly 10 PM – 6 AM. When you compare that … Continue reading
Embracing Winter?
Remember back in 2008 when I absolutely hated Winter? At that time I was fairly certain that within a few years I’d either start spending my winter somewhere down South or move out of the Northeast all together. Now, a few years later, I surprisingly don’t mind winter. In fact, I’m sort of enjoying winter. What changed? The Weather First and foremost, the weather has changed the past two winters. Since Albany is not in the mountains, not on the coast, and not near any of the great lakes, and since the temperatures have been a bit warmer (because of … Continue reading
Maintaining a Social Life After Leaving the Corporate World
When I first left my career as an engineer to run SportsLizard, my sole focus in life was building a successful business. I viewed anything that got in the way of my work to be an annoyance, and that included anything social. For probably the first six months I spent what seemed like every waking hour of every day working my ass off. I felt like I didn’t deserve a break. Real quickly I learned that isolating yourself doesn’t make you happy, that relationships are as much a part of happiness as doing work you enjoy. I think this actualization … Continue reading
What do you want from your work?
My partners and I have a running joke. One of us will pose the question “how much would someone have to pay you to do ___?” Most of the time, we just fill in the blank with the most obscene things our minds can conjure up, and then vehemently debate just how much money you’d need to humiliate yourself. It makes for some entertaining discussion. Sometimes though, we’ll pose a business related question. Like “how much would someone have to pay you to teach basic computer skills to the elderly every day for two years?”, or more realistically, “how much … Continue reading
How Being in Control of Your Work Drastically Reduces Stress (and just might save your life)
Last month Wired Magazine published a fascinating article on the science of stress called Under Pressure: The Search for a Stress Vaccine. The essence of the article is that while it’s becoming understood that stress has negative emotional, cognitive, and physical effects, we don’t fully understand the depths of what causes stress (for instance, the article talks about how stress endured during childhood or even by a mother during pregnancy can permanently change your DNA), which forms of stress are good for us and which ones are detrimental, nor do we fully understand how to go about “solving” stress (i.e. … Continue reading
Too Busy People
One of my least favorite phrases that people use is “I’m too busy for that”. I don’t really believe that any of us are too busy for anything that’s important to us. We all have the same 24x7x365 to work with, and we all have a large say in how we spend it. What you’re really saying (and what other people hear) when you say “I’m too busy” is “I don’t want to”, or “I’m too important for that”. It sends the wrong message to the people around you. One thing I’ve come to realize lately is that the vast … Continue reading