{"id":479164,"date":"2026-02-14T09:05:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-14T09:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/479164\/"},"modified":"2026-02-14T09:05:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-14T09:05:14","slug":"why-i-stopped-chasing-money-and-focused-on-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/479164\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Stopped Chasing Money and Focused on Health"},"content":{"rendered":"

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tyler Smith<\/a>, founder of Hundred Health<\/a>. It has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

I used to brag about how little sleep<\/a> I got. It felt like a superpower: I could sleep just three or four hours a night, and still operate at a very high level.<\/p>\n

That helped me get ahead early on. As a teen, I bused tables<\/a> and sold firewood. By the time I was 19, I bought a house (which was possible because it was the subprime mortgage days). Having a mortgage gave me real responsibility at a young age.<\/p>\n

It also got me thinking about a career. I couldn’t believe how much my real estate agent<\/a> made on the sale. Her commission was about $13,000 \u2014 which seemed like $1 million to me at the time \u2014 and I thought she didn’t do a very good job. I realized that if I did good work in real estate, I could make even more.<\/p>\n

I did well in real estate and developed software that took off<\/p>\n

I dropped out of college<\/a> to get into real estate. During the financial crisis, I found a niche helping banks sell foreclosures. In 2006 and 2007, I oversaw about 1,000 home sales a year and managed triple that number of properties.<\/p>\n

I was working 14-hour days, seven days a week. It wasn’t a good life, but I was young enough that it didn’t matter. I fueled myself on energy drinks<\/a> and embraced the fact that work was my life.<\/p>\n

To help scale, I developed software to track my business’s transactions. Other brokerages inquired about what I was using, and soon I had clients paying $2,000 or $5,000 a month to use the software.<\/p>\n

I was in the right place at the right time with the right product as real estate transactions went digital. By 2012, that software, SkySlope, was doing $12 million in annual revenue. In 2017, Fidelity bought a majority stake, valuing the company at more than $80 million.<\/p>\n

I wanted to focus on my passion: health<\/p>\n

That deal meant that I had enough money<\/a> to never work again. I’m wired to build, though, so I planned to use my financial freedom to focus on something with purpose: a mission-driven business.<\/p>\n

When I was 39, my wife and I were trying to have a child. I took a biological age test, which said my biological age<\/a> was 47. That stopped me in my tracks, because my own father had died suddenly of a heart attack at 47.<\/p>\n

The test showed me that what I was telling myself wasn’t true. I was working out and eating relatively healthy. I looked fit, but the data showed that what was happening inside my body didn’t match what was on the outside.<\/p>\n

I spent over $1 million building a home wellness center<\/p>\n

Once I saw that data, I couldn’t ignore it. I spent well over six figures hiring a top-notch healthcare team. My wife and I rented a 2,000 square-foot unit in Sacramento, which we transformed into our own personal wellness center. It had IV infusions<\/a>, a hyperbaric chamber, a red light bed, cold plunges, massagers \u2014 basically anything you can name in the health and fitness world.<\/p>\n

We were building a home in Napa and wanted to know which equipment we would actually use. We spent about $700,000 fitting out the Sacramento space, and eventually over $1 million building the wellness center in our home.<\/p>\n

Today, I use the red light bed, oxygen therapy, and cold plunge almost daily. Other therapies \u2014 like massagers and bikes \u2014 didn’t make the final cut. I love the results of the hyperbaric chamber, but don’t like lying in it for an hour, so for now, that’s out of rotation.<\/p>\n

I want to help others have more access to health information<\/p>\n

I changed everything about my health and fitness, and because of that, everything in my life changed: my muscle mass and energy levels went through the roof, and my mood improved. I felt better than ever, and friends began to notice.<\/p>\n

I know not everyone has the money and access I do. Most people have more data about their health than ever due to smart watches and wearable monitors, but they don’t have a team of doctors helping them use that information.<\/p>\n

I started Hundred Health not only to provide data, but also to offer a personalized plan for what to do with it. I used to think that wealth was freedom, but now I know that health is \u2014 and I would like to help more people access that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tyler Smith, founder of Hundred Health. It has been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":479165,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[64,63,137,500],"class_list":{"0":"post-479164","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-healthcare"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=479164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479164\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/479165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}