Ryan Holiday opens his book, Ego is the Enemy, with a quote from Richard Feynman, who said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."

Ego is such an important thing to master, especially as you attempt challenging work. Running a small business or private practice is not easy. At every step of the way, your ego can place you in a haze of delusion and allow your enthusiasm to blind you with overly-optimistic projections, assumptions about how the market feels about your products or services and big assumptions we make on the part of consumer demand and the amount of hard work that is required to achieve what our ego has convinced us should be easy.

Starting a practice, raising a child, nurturing relationships, writing a book, running a volunteer organization – all of these things are hard enough, even if you've stripped ego out of the equation. If you don't master your ego, these pursuits can become impossible.

Ryan Holiday shares in this episode of The Burleson Box, "If you believe that your success says something about you as a person, that it says that you're better than other people, that you're smart, that you're attractive, that you're special, that you're amazing, that you're all these things, which it doesn't, the problem is then, when you go through difficulty or failure which is an inevitable part of life, which happens even to incredibly successful people, the problem is now all of a sudden you think that your failure says something about you as a person, too. So, it's not good to have ego when you're successful, but it's potentially fatal to have ego when you're going through a tough time."

On the program, you'll hear practical advice from Ryan Holiday and learn from several examples throughout history how you can put your ego in focus and manage it, so that you can do great work and achieve your goals.

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Resources Mentioned on The Burleson Box:

• Ego is the Enemy
• Ryan Holiday Reading List
• Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American
• Truman by David McCullough
• Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters
• The Red Queen Effect
• Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins

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