Train like a warrior.
Think like a poet.
Lead like a king.
MCX rests on one conviction: the warrior and the poet were never meant to be different men. Across 61 traditions, the man held up as master of himself was most often trained in two things at once, a contest skill of the body and a discipline of the word: the sword and the pen. The poems and the practice here both serve that man, ordered under God and kept as simple as the work allows.
EX DISCIPLINA . LIBERTAS · MCX . A.D. MMXXVI
I'm Marcian. I'm an Orthodox Christian, I train with my body alone, rope flow and then bodyweight calisthenics, and I write a poem every week. Every morning starts outside with the breathing I teach in the Primer. I'm not selling a life I don't keep.
Modern man is sick, alone and aimless. He lives without hierarchy, without order, without purpose and, most of all, without God. He's been trained to think like a philosopher and live like a consumer: to curate the appearance of virtue online, quoting Seneca between distractions, and to trade the discipline of living for the performance of thinking. Everything here begins by refusing that bargain.
My method is first principles: don't take a rule on anyone's word, go down to what can't be reduced any further. For the forming of a man, I take that ground to be what peoples with no contact between them arrived at on their own. I call this classical cultural convergence, or CCC. I surveyed 61 traditions, ancient and modern, East and West, and counted how many unrelated lineages hold each practice. A rule kept by one school is an opinion. A rule kept by peoples an ocean and four thousand years apart is close to the nature of man.
The first thing the survey found was the warrior poet. Shulgi, king of Ur in southern Iraq around 2090 BC, boasted that he'd learned the scribal art as a boy and was skilled with lance and sling. Four thousand years later, a Maori chief in New Zealand was judged on his courage in war and on his oratory. The man held up as master of himself was most often trained in two things at once, a contest skill of the body and a discipline of the word: the sword and the pen. True wisdom has to be lived or it dies. The classical world called the living of it askesis: ordered effort, the submission of the body to a purpose higher than comfort.
The body is the first text. The man who cannot govern himself
cannot govern anything else.
The second thing it found was the order that holds the two together. The traditions agree on far more than any one of them teaches, and what they agree on reduces to nine laws, set out below. Over all nine stands one ethos: simplicitas perfectio est, simplicity is perfection. Every rule, practice and sentence should use the fewest parts that do the job, because complexity adds chaos.
This is the shape of the work. The poetry, one poem a week, is the pen: wisdom in verse, Orthodox, demanding and earned. Mastery is the practice, where the sword and the pen meet. It starts with the 14-Day Self-Mastery Primer, a free guide that gives you a morning that pulls you out of bed and a way to beat an urge in ten minutes.
None of this is self-help. It's a rule of life older and deeper than anything the market is selling, the kind monks, soldiers and scholars built civilizations on. It's for the man who's tired of a life assembled from the market's preferences and wants a life that's actually his. If that's you, Christian or not yet, you're in the right place.
THE NINE LAWS
Be taught.
Learn from a living man, among other men. Xenophon, the Greek soldier and historian, wrote that Persian boys learned temperance by watching their elders live it. No tradition expects a man to form himself alone.
Bind yourself.
Stake your will on a commitment before the act, so that taking it back costs you. Odysseus, in Homer's Odyssey, had his men tie him to the mast before the Sirens sang. He didn't trust his will in the moment, so he spent it beforehand.
Order the surroundings.
Remove the occasion so the will isn't asked. When researchers gave 205 people beepers for a week, the ones with the most self-control didn't resist more. They met fewer temptations in the first place (Hofmann and colleagues, 2012).
Keep a rule.
Live by a short written order of hours that fits your strength. Benedict of Nursia, the sixth-century Italian monk, wrote a rule of hours that monks still keep fifteen centuries later. A day with an order doesn't have to be decided again every morning.
Rule the body.
Train the body and its appetite by hardship, work and a contest skill. This is the sword. Seneca, the Roman Stoic, recommended short, simple exercises that tire the body quickly, and then a quick return from body to mind.
Guard the mind.
Hold attention on one thing and keep the word in it. This is the pen. Evagrius, a fourth-century desert monk, told men to watch their thoughts the way a hunter watches an animal: when it comes, what follows it, how strong it gets.
Climb by steps.
Form the man by repeated deeds, one grade at a time. Aristotle wrote that we become just by doing just acts and brave by doing brave ones (Nicomachean Ethics, Book II). Character is built the way a skill is, by practice.
Be seen.
Let something other than your own report check your conduct after the act. In the Buddhist monastic code, a monk who declares his fault is restored, and one who hides it pays a price that grows every day he hides it.
Return at once.
A fall has a known way back and never ends the road. Alcoholics Anonymous answers a relapse with three words: keep coming back. In a study of habit formation, a single missed day didn't set the habit back (Lally and colleagues, 2010).
None of this is meant to be admired. It's meant to be lived. Begin with one vice and fourteen days.
Start With One Vice.
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