My Story
Welcome to Health + Wealth Explorer!
My name is Wade, and you can consider me the Explorer-in-Chief around here.
So what is this site all about? Well, it’s all in the name (which, by the way, we pronounce “Health and Wealth Explorer”). In a nutshell, we explore topics that help people achieve and maintain optimal health and topics that help people build and grow personal wealth.
I’ve heard the phrase “health is wealth” used to highlight the idea that being in good health is a type of wealth or to signify the foundational importance or priority of health, and I’m definitely a subscriber to this type of thinking.
Having financial wealth (however you personally define it) can certainly be something that’s important and worth striving for, but would being financially wealthy be all that great if you were physically unhealthy? Would you rather be very healthy with modest financial means or would you rather be very wealthy but in poor physical health? I believe that being physically healthy is the top priority and for that reason I tend to lean more toward health-related topics in my exploration. But I also recognize that health and wealth can intertwine in many ways and are not mutually exclusive.
So in an ideal world, we don’t have to make an either/or kind of choice between health and wealth. Instead, through continual exploration, learning, and growth, we can find a path that leads us toward being both healthy AND wealthy! But I still think the primary focus should be on health. 😉
I’ve been into health and fitness for about as long as I can remember.
Even when I was a young child I was concerned with “eating healthy” and exercising.
That’s not to say that I was always successful in “eating healthy”. The definition of what “eating healthy” even means has changed so much over the years, but I can say with confidence that I’ve eaten more than my fair share of “bad food” throughout my life.
But the thing is… I always had an overall desire to “eat healthy” and a general belief that what kind of food I put in my body was important. And over time, as I explored, refined, and gained knowledge, I developed my own understanding of what it means to “eat healthy”.
Exercise went hand-in-hand with my desire to eat healthy. Some of my focus on exercise was the result of my participation in sports, but a lot of it was influenced by the superheroes I saw in cartoons and comic books and by the action heroes I saw in movies and TV. I wanted to be able to do the things that these characters could do and I wanted to look the way that they looked.
So even at a very young age you might find me exercising by lifting weights from my dad’s home gym set or trying to replicate some training regimen that I saw in a martial arts movie. I never did develop the ripped physique of a Hollywood action hero or learn how to perform the gravity-defying moves of a big screen ninja, but I’ve never stopped trying.
Speaking of martial arts… I admit that I’ve been a bit of a martial arts junkie for most of my life. This ultimately led me to taking up Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (or “BJJ”) more than 15 years ago. It’s definitely a passion of mine, and I’m a big proponent of BJJ and the impact that BJJ (and martial arts in general) can have on a person’s life. So you will undoubtedly see me write a lot about BJJ and its positive effects on health.
Where I am today
I’m not a kid anymore. Far from it. And now I have kids of my own. This is what drives me today. As the saying goes, I’m not getting any younger. But oddly enough, I sort of feel like I am getting younger. Or at least I can say that I feel like I’m in the best shape of my life. This is what it means to me to be healthy. I want to physically and mentally be the best “me” that I can be at every age, and I believe that can be achieved through food and fitness. But beyond wanting this for myself, I want it for my kids… so that I can be here for them for as long as possible and so that I can instill in them a focus on health that they will carry through life.
As much as health and fitness has always been a part of my life, I never really engaged with them professionally. I did acquire some health and fitness certifications along the way (which you can see listed below), but those were mainly just to expand my knowledge or done in association with side projects. From a professional standpoint, I instead went into information technology and communications and have nearly 25 years of experience working with everything from tech startups to Internet service providers to Cloud communications companies.
Over those years I made some decent money, and as a result I started exploring different ways to generate, save, invest, and grow wealth. So when I write about wealth-related topics, this is the point of view I’m coming from. I’m not a financial advisor or some wealth building guru. I’m just a guy who’s trying to make a living and exploring ways of building wealth to create long term financial security for his family.
So that’s my story, and that’s why I’m a Health + Wealth Explorer. Thank you for taking the time to read this and to learn what we’re all about. I hope you’ll explore with me, and I look forward to sharing the journey with you. Click the “I’m ready” button below to visit the blog and and get started.
