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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
Warehouse Hockey & Company Culture
Last year I wrote about how we use our shipping dock as a hockey goal. For a while it was fun to just blast shots at the goal. Then it was fun to try to score a goal from real far away. Then it was fun to put up targets with pictures of our least favorite vendors. But alas, all of that grew old. So Greg and I set out to make up a new game to entertain us when we didn’t feel like working. After months of experimentation I think we’ve found it. On the back side of our … Continue reading
The Entrepreneurs Hierarchy of Needs?
On the way to work today I was listening to an audiobook version of the book FREE: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson (available for free on Audible) when he mentioned Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, something I was familiar with from college psychology class. Immediately I zoned out and started thinking about how this impacts business owners. The basic premise of Maslow’s hierarchy is that there is a pyramid of human needs, the higher up of which can only be met when the lower, more basic needs are fulfilled. Here’s the diagram from Wikipedia: Without having your … Continue reading
Business Lifestyle Design
In January I was a little hard on myself when evaluating my ’08 progress and my ’09 goals. I try to somewhat separate myself from the business because they’re not necessarily correlated, and because I’m evaluating more than just the company. It’s easy to get caught up in always trying to do whatever it takes to make more money, but I want to make sure that I’m not doing that at the expense of things that are more important to me. Finding time for my friends and family, making sure I get to the gym, making sure I get enough … Continue reading
Celebrating Our Success
In this day and age, where nothing is easy, we’ve accomplished a great deal as a business over the past few years. Last month we hit several milestones sooner than we had anticipated. One of the things I love about our company is that whenever we’re at a meeting and we’re discussing something big that we’ve done, there’s always talk of how and when we’re going to celebrate. Last night we went to dinner at a “trendy” wine bar in Albany. It was possibly the best meal I’ve ever had in my life. The whole thing took almost four hours. … Continue reading
Caring More About Your Business than Yourself
This is sort of an addendum to the last post from a little while ago. Running a business also teaches you a selflessness that translates great to other aspects of life. Not paying yourself so that you can expand. Taking less pay so that you can hire an employee. Living with your parents or in a crappy apartment to save money. Donating your tax return back to the company instead of spending it on yourself. Taking care of a customer because it’s the right thing to do, even if the expense comes out of your pocket. Covering for a partner … Continue reading
Entrepreneurship is a Life Question
Jim Collins, author of one of my favorite business books, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t, was interviewed in the 30th Anniversary Issue of Inc. Magazine last month. The entire article is a good read, but one question in particular stood out to me: How do you define entrepreneurship? I take a broad view of it. The traditional definition — founding an entity designed to make money — is too narrow for me. I see entrepreneurship as more of a life concept. We all make choices about how we live our lives. You can … Continue reading
Consistency = Success = Happiness?
This past week I noticed that the gym was noticeably emptier. In fact, it’s been getting less and less crowded every week for the past month or so. This is perfectly normal, because it’s March, and March is just about when everyone who made a New Year’s Resolution to get in shape is starting to give up. Especially the people who go early in the morning like I do. They slip back into their bad old habits and find ways to justify doing other things with their time (or more likely, sleeping an extra hour…which isn’t bad, but you could … Continue reading
You Aren’t Your Business
One of the things that I think is important to understand about running a business – and this was re-iterated to me during my week off – is that your business doesn’t define who you are. To me, your core values and beliefs, the relationships you have with others, your experiences, those things define you. In my week off I spoke about business for probably a grand total of 5 minutes. I spent a whole lot of time doing a ton of things that interest me a lot, and none of them have to do with Pure Adapt. Take from … Continue reading
Productive Napping
In my quest to become healthy, happy, and productive, I’ve become fascinated with sleep over the past few years. I always exercise regularly and for the most part I eat very healthy, but a good nights sleep eluded me for a long time. The problem started in high school where I routinely got less sleep than I needed, and then just sort of continued into college and the workforce. Like most of us, being sleep deprived became the norm. However, since I started working for myself a few years back I’ve been able to experiment with what makes me … Continue reading
If I Couldn’t Run a Business…
Let’s just say hypothetically that for some reason I was not legally allowed to run a business for an indefinite amount of time starting tomorrow. What would I do? If you run a business, what would you do? I’m not sure why, but I think about this question quite often. I don’t really foresee myself ever not running a business, but I always wonder what I’d be doing if I wasn’t. If I wanted to return to the corporate world, I’d dust off my resume and start applying for either engineering or web development/SEO jobs. I’d research and contact only … Continue reading