{"id":45391,"date":"2026-02-14T08:22:59","date_gmt":"2026-02-14T08:22:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/i-used-to-be-proud-of-only-sleeping-3-hours-because-i-worked-so-much-now-i-realize-health-is-freedom-not-wealth\/"},"modified":"2026-02-14T08:22:59","modified_gmt":"2026-02-14T08:22:59","slug":"i-used-to-be-proud-of-only-sleeping-3-hours-because-i-worked-so-much-now-i-realize-health-is-freedom-not-wealth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/i-used-to-be-proud-of-only-sleeping-3-hours-because-i-worked-so-much-now-i-realize-health-is-freedom-not-wealth\/","title":{"rendered":"I used to be proud of only sleeping 3 hours because I worked so much. Now I realize health is freedom, not wealth."},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/69850b3ae1ba468a96ab82db?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Tyler Smith headshot\"\/><figcaption>Tyler Smith used to think wealth was freedom, but after his dad died at 47, he realized health is more important.<\/p>\n<p>Courtesy of Tyler Smith<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Tyler Smith built SkySlope, a real estate software valued at $80 million in a 2017 sale.<\/li>\n<li>Soon after, he took a health screening that put his biological age at 47 \u2014 the age his dad died.<\/li>\n<li>He spent more than $1 million creating a home wellness center and started a health-focused company.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with <\/em>Tyler Smith<em>, founder of<\/em> Hundred Health<em>. It has been edited for length and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I used to brag about how little sleep 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<p>That helped me get ahead early on. As a teen, I bused tables 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<p>It also got me thinking about a career. I couldn&#039;t believe how much my real estate agent 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&#039;t do a very good job. I realized that if I did good work in real estate, I could make even more.<\/p>\n<h2>I did well in real estate and developed software that took off<\/h2>\n<p>I dropped out of college 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<p>I was working 14-hour days, seven days a week. It wasn&#039;t a good life, but I was young enough that it didn&#039;t matter. I fueled myself on energy drinks and embraced the fact that work was my life.<\/p>\n<p>To help scale, I developed software to track my business&#039;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<p>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<h2>I wanted to focus on my passion: health<\/h2>\n<p>That deal meant that I had enough money to never work again. I&#039;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<p>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 was 47. That stopped me in my tracks, because my own father had died suddenly of a heart attack at 47.<\/p>\n<p>The test showed me that what I was telling myself wasn&#039;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&#039;t match what was on the outside.<\/p>\n<h2>I spent over $1 million building a home wellness center<\/h2>\n<p>Once I saw that data, I couldn&#039;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 hyperbaric chamber, a red light bed, cold plunges, massagers \u2014 basically anything you can name in the health and fitness world.<\/p>\n<p>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<p>Today, I use the red light bed, oxygen therapy, and cold plunge almost daily. Other therapies \u2014 like massagers and bikes \u2014 didn&#039;t make the final cut. I love the results of the hyperbaric chamber, but don&#039;t like lying in it for an hour, so for now, that&#039;s out of rotation.<\/p>\n<h2>I want to help others have more access to health information<\/h2>\n<p>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<p>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&#039;t have a team of doctors helping them use that information.<\/p>\n<p>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<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tyler Smith used to think wealth was freedom, but after his dad died at 47, he realized health is more important. Courtesy of Tyler Smith Tyler Smith built SkySlope, a real estate software valued at $80 million in a 2017 sale. Soon after, he took a health screening that put his biological age at 47 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45392,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-45391","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45391\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}