You could say that failure always arrives uninvited, but through our ego, far too many of us allow it to stick around. Whether what you’re going through is your fault or your problem doesn’t matter, because it’s yours to deal with right now. We do that when our sense of self is fragile and dependent on life going our way all the time. Psychologists call it narcissistic injury when we take personally totally indifference and objective events.

(Washington Post, Katharine Graham)Įgo loves this notion, the idea that something is “fair” or not. It turns out that the long hard slog she (Katharine Graham, CEO of the Washington Post from, 1963-1993) endured, the mistakes she make, the repeated failures, crises, and attacks were all leading somewhere. If ego is often just a nasty side effect of great success, it can be fatal during failure.Ī Trial is Something Each Person Must Endure: If success is ego intoxication, then failure can be a devastating ego blow. We don’t need pity - our own or anyone else’s - we need purpose, poise, and patience. The way through, the way to rise again, requires a reorientation and increased self awareness. No one is permanently successful, and not everyone finds success on the first attempt. “Almost always, your road to victory goes through a place called ‘failure’”. I also hope that after being exposed to the ideas in the book, you’ll pick up a copy for yourself and explore the way your own ego may be holding you back and the strategies and tactics you can employ to conquer your own ego. I hope you’ll learn something you can take with you and apply to your own life. What follows are my favorite excerpts, takeaways and lessons learned from the third section (‘Failure’) of Ryan’s book. This third, and final part, we’ll learn how to be resilient in our failures. In Part 2, we focused on being gracious in our successes.

In Part 1 of this multi-part review we learned how to be humble in our aspirations. The book is organized into three parts: Aspire. There’s so much good stuff in this book that I’m doing something a little bit different with this review. In an era that glorifies social media, reality TV, and other forms of shameless self-promotion, the battle against ego must be fought on many fronts. In failure, it magnifies each blow and makes recovery more difficult. With success, it can blind us to our faults and sow future problems. In fact, the most common enemy lies within: our ego.Įarly in our careers, it impedes learning and the cultivation of talent. “ Ego is the Enemy” explores the fact that many of us insist the main impediment to a full, successful life is the outside world.

The ego is the enemy marcus aurelius