My Mission and Editorial Guidelines
My Mission
My Mission is to help others gain agency over their lives with better decision-making, knowledge, and the power of planning. To share things I have learned that aren’t taught broadly but probably should be. To pass along knowledge so that the next generation can be better of than the previous. So that they can build a broader base and pass that knowledge in turn.
The most valuable things I have learned focus on areas of life like leadership, planning, decision-making, risk management, and personnel development. None of these can be accomplished without a focus on every aspect of health. This includes optimization of physical, mental, and emotional health, as well as diet, nutrition, and supplementation to maximize longevity.
I am not an expert. I don’t need to be, and neither do you. Experts are critical to knowledge and learning but often come with limits. Many experts are so focused on their field that they miss the proverbial forest for the trees. They often become so focused on a narrow band of expertise that they miss the bigger picture. Without them, we would never know the intricacies of their research. But alone their findings and lessons can be distorted and misapplied. This stovepiping of knowledge and understanding can cause us to miss the obvious right in front of us. We live in a complex world of interconnected systems operating in unison. Too many fields forget this, failing to collaborate with other experts to build the bigger picture. Pulling different concepts together to form a coherent whole…to me, begins to answer what it means to be wiser.
My Mission is to be wiser and help others to be wiser as well.
What does it mean to be wiser? Beweixer. Bewiexer is mostly a play on my name and, well, because benweiss.com was taken. Turns out there are a lot of Ben Weiss’ out there. But as I developed the concept for this blog I found it fit exactly what I was looking for.
So what does it mean to be weisser? Ok, I’m not just bad at spelling. There’s a point to this I promise so stay with me. Weiss in German typically refers to the color white, but it is also a form of the root word for knowledge or wisdom. I found this to be convenient. Ich weiss, means, I know.
So Beweixer is how I intend to spread knowledge and wisdom to the best of my abilities based on my professional expertise, and research. Additionally, I want to focus on teaching concepts that I believe are most valuable to as many people as possible and that aren’t taught in schools. Like…
Leadership. There is an old debate about whether leadership is natural or learned. Leadership absolutely can and should be learned. Leadership is the human component of management. You don’t just manage resources and time. And you may manage people, but that isn’t leadership. How we interact with other humans in the achievement of a mission, objective or goals is what leadership is all about. If you treat your people like a resource or a widget, you will see firsthand the results of poor leadership.
Planning. Plan the verb, not the noun. The importance of planning is captured in this distinction. It is not enough to have a plan (noun), the true value is in the process of planning, to plan (verb). The insight developed through preparation from the process of planning is greater than any actual plan. As a professional military planner, I have learned firsthand the power and benefits of understanding how to plan. Every military professional understands this to some degree, however planning as a skill was something I was only exposed to deliberately and is not widely understood or taught broadly outside the military. I intend to use this platform to share my experience and knowledge on the importance of planning and how to plan.
Decision Making. Making good decisions is about Risk. Risk management is another skill not widely taught. Between my personnel experience and research and years developing briefs and products to support 4-star admirals and generals making some of the most consequential decisions on earth. I’ve learned a great deal about what goes into decision-making and how to make the best decisions with the information available all balanced by risk.
Health. There are multiple categories of health. Physical, Mental, and Emotional Health. Not to mention Financial Health which for many arguably has a significant impact on every other form of health if not adequately planned for. If you’re trying to improve your health, physical, or mental performance I believe there is a hierarchy of methods you should pursue to achieve those improvements.
- Behavior
- Nutrition
- Supplementation
- Medication
If at all possible I believe you should make behavioral changes first, and seek medication only when absolutely necessary. To the best of your ability, you should strive to meet your nutritional needs as much as possible through whole foods before turning to supplements. Neither of these should discourage you from using supplements and medications you need. I believe you should make these decisions with your doctor. You should also know what to ask them.
Research. With a background in physics, I learned early on the importance of research and experimentation as it leads to discovery and learning. I also learned early the importance of accountability and ethics in these endeavors. We must continuously guard against special interests, conflicts of interests, and the ego or otherwise self-serving motivations of scientists making a name for themselves. Today we have governments and institutions that make broad sweeping proclamations about what we should or should not do for our health without a clear understanding of the limitations of the experiments that led to those recommendations. Most people never question these results and we sometimes go decades before we fully appreciate we’ve been following the wrong advice to the detriment of our health this whole time.
Fitness. Movement is medicine. If you want to live a long and happy life, you need to exercise. It influences every aspect of your health, not just the physical. I have tried just about everything under the sun and my best general advice is to find something that you are most likely to stick with long term. The biggest reason that exercise programs fail is consistency. Aside from that, from a health and longevity perspective, there is compelling science that suggests that you probably need some of everything if you want that long and healthy life. That means you probably need to dedicate at least two days a week to doing things that you probably don’t want to do. That might be cardio for some, and weightlifting for others, but I hope to share some of the best ways that I’ve come up with to help habitualize those activities and encourage long-term adherence.
Nutrition. There are no well-controlled dietary studies. It took me a while to fully appreciate this. Most are based on epidemiological studies of broad populations. Others are either poorly controlled, too short in duration, or ignore the collection of or publishing of important data points that could meaningfully alter the results. There is also so much genetic variation from person to person that the best nutritional experiment will ultimately be the N of 1 study. The experiment you perform on yourself. I want to encourage others that there is no simple answer to nutritional health information and to be confident and emboldened to experiment to find out what works best for you. I intend to do that by sharing my personal experiences and what I have learned about myself on this journey and the science behind why it works for me. Know that it may not work for you but be encouraged that it is possible without too much difficulty to discover what dietary or nutritional practices are best for you.
Finance. Money is a major source of stress and conflict for many people. By all accounts the saying is true, “money cannot buy happiness,” but money can buy you time. Often when people talk about financial freedom, what they are really trying to achieve is time freedom. Just look at those with tons of money but no real control over their time. They are miserable and the first to tell you that money doesn’t buy happiness. Finance is also the medium through which we link our health and planning. Money, or finance is the resource by which we make decisions and balance risk, and work to improve our physical and mental health. We don’t teach anyone about financial concepts. This is why economic cycles repeat. Try as hard as we might, we repeat the mistakes of the past making the next recession inevitable. Don’t let someone else’s financial ignorance destroy your life.
Longevity. Longevity is the summation of everything above. The ability to live a long healthy life without pain and to have planned appropriately with good decisions and balanced risk to make every year count. If you really want longevity, you can’t afford (quite literally) to leave your body, your mind, OR your money behind. An often not-talked-about aspect of longevity is sustainability. I believe these two things go hand in hand. The more I learned about longevity and how much every system in our body is related, the more I came across lessons about sustainability and the systems and ecosystems around us that influence us too. We interact with our world. If our biology matters, so does the biology of the world around us. If we are serious about passing knowledge on to later generations, being smart custodians of our environment must always be considered. Too many lessons connect to our environment and how closely linked and related our environment and nature are.
All of these things are inextricably linked. They may be different fields, terms, or otherwise areas of expertise, but changes in any of them may have dramatic consequences in the others.
Editorial Guidelines
Purpose
Why I do this.
As a prior military helicopter pilot and operational planner, I’ve spent most of my life trying to maintain optimal health and mental acuity. I’ve spend a lot of my life working on planning, leadership, decision-making, risk management, and optimizing physical and mental performance.
As a military tactics instructor, I learned concepts as an instructor that I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t been taught when I was a young pilot and training in my first squadron by my instructors. Most of this information wasn’t new. It just either wasn’t well understood, or wasn’t known.
As I review other aspects of life I consider important I’m struck with a similar situation. Concepts about health, fitness, nutrition, and finance, I learned on my own, and much later than would have been maximally beneficial. And again, these concepts weren’t new. Most of them have been known for a while. Sometimes knowledge can be lost to time by ancient cultures or purged in wars. Others are forgotten or dismissed because they weren’t well understood. Ultimately these things weren’t taught, but they should be. The earlier they are taught, the better to make the most use of this knowledge for a much more fulfilling life.
In many cases, despite a desire and willingness to learn, I found finding the right information difficult and have spent years of my life doing either the wrong thing, or otherwise making my life more difficult. All because I didn’t know. And no one taught me.
I want to share what I have learned and how I arrived at many of my conclusions about many of these topics to encourage others also not to just buy into what they are told, as most of what society will tell you is at best an oversimplification of a much more complex issue and in other cases flat out lies. In both of these cases, the motivation seems to be good intentions. How do we help the greatest number of people? But sometimes they are wrong. We have a hard time admitting it, or changing course. And I’m not most people, and likely neither are you. Knowing and understanding more of the complex details the experts are hesitant to share with you will help you make the best decisions for yourself.
There are over 100 medical sub-specialties. None of them talk to each other. Until the American medical establishment can overcome its specialization silos, individuals must do the work themselves to connect the dots or fall through the cracks. I’m here to connect the dots myself and help you connect your dots too.
To really understand how I got here you can learn more about my personal story here.
Method
All articles are written by humans. I may use AI for the purposes of experimenting with this emerging capability for my own learning. I will use AI to help generate images, stimulate ideas, and potential outlines for writing in order to help speed and streamline content production. However, all thoughts and reviews are generated from genuine opinions, research, and experience.
Knowledge is power. For those that are willing to search and find, we live in unprecedented times where every piece of information is just a click away. Yet, in this vast sea of information, navigating through the mess of advertisements and misinformation can make it difficult to know what is true or just what to do.
Teach and educate so that you can make use of these concepts on your own without my help.
“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” – Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu.
There is a lot of content, especially on social media, promising quick and easy. Nothing worth having in this life comes easy. These people are promising dreams. Dreams are free. If you want your dreams to become reality hard work and preparation are the only way. Exceptional dreams require exceptional effort to become reality. Don’t pay money for dreams.
Give more than you receive. My site is reader-supported. Leveraging a combination of advertising or affiliate links, I provide my content for free at no additional cost to you if you purchase any item or service through a link on my site. Simply by reading and making purchases through my links you are supporting the continued development of content free of charge.
Help readers with honesty and integrity. I will be wrong. At any given time, something I write about will more than likely be proven false over time. It’s ok to be wrong, but it’s not ok to stay wrong. I will always represent my opinions with honesty and integrity, and if I discover or come to believe through evidence that something I have published is wrong, I will admit it and make sure I share the lesson with as many as possible. Three of the most underrated and important skills in life are the ability to say “I was wrong”, “I don’t know,” or to change your mind in the presence of new information.
I may evaluate products or services related to the topics I write about. A key component of decision-making I learned as a military planner is the importance of the planning factors that lead to a decision. Requirements, capabilities, strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. This way you can make the most informed decision for yourself. What might be my top pick based I what is most important to me might not be right for you, but if I can give you all the right information to make the best decision for yourself then I believe I was successful in helping you get what you’re looking for.
Teaching and educating on concepts that generally aren’t taught in schools that I think are valuable for anyone to know. There are too many things that I learned late in life that I should have known sooner. I want to help as many people prevent this occurrence as possible
Why I conduct reviews.
I believe reviews are an important part of helping others make decisions. Free trial periods for many services may not be sufficient to trial some of the more critical elements of a product and reviews can help close the gap to making a purchase decision that’s best for you. Some products often come with claims that are difficult to validate especially when they purport to improve some function of health or make you “feel” a certain way. You should understand how to measure the effectiveness of these products so that you don’t blindly spend money for something that you don’t know is helping or not.
Many times before using a product I’ve had questions that I would love to have answers to that just sometimes aren’t there or are otherwise difficult to find. I have personally found reviews for sources I trust to ultimately be the deciding factor for making a decision. For this reason, I want to give back and hopefully earn the trust of you the reader, in hopes of helping you make a decision you are happy with. Ultimately. Trust is important to providing honest reviews of products to help you is one of my guiding principles.
Guiding Principles.
These are the principles by which I approach the writing and content of this blog. To enable my readers in the following ways.
I want to build and maintain the trust of my readers.
To enable agency over their lives through the power of knowledge and information.
To make the best possible decisions for themselves and that they are happy with.
Learn and understand how to make better decisions
Leave those I contact in a better place than where they started.