मच्चित्तः सर्वदुर्गाणि मत्प्रसादात्तरिष्यसि।अथ चेत्त्वमहङ्कारान्न श्रोष्यसि विनङ्क्ष्यसि॥
mac-cittaḥ sarva-durgāṇi mat-prasādāt tariṣyasiatha cet tvam ahankārān na śroṣyasi vinaṅkṣyasi
Word by word
The verse says
With your thought on me you will get past every hard place by my grace. But if from self-importance you will not listen, you will be lost.
In plain words
A promise and a warning in one breath, and the warning is sharper than anything for several chapters.
The hard places get crossed. And then: if you will not listen, out of ahaṅkāra, you will be lost.
Note what the obstacle is. Not wickedness. Not weakness. Not listening, because of self-importance.
Where you've felt this · in failure
Your father's cousin has been told by three separate people, over two years, that the way he speaks to younger colleagues is driving them out. Each time he explains why they have misread him, and each explanation is reasonable. The fourth person does not bother telling him. By then there is nobody left who would.
Going deeper
Self-importance is named here as the thing that stops a person listening, and that is a more precise diagnosis than it first appears.
Not listening is rarely about hearing. The information arrives perfectly well. What blocks it is that accepting it would cost something: an account of yourself that has been expensive to build and is load-bearing.
That is why the consequence is put so starkly. Every other failure in this book is recoverable, because every other failure leaves the correction route open. This one closes the route. A person who cannot be told anything cannot be helped by anyone, including by a book.
It is also the one failing you cannot detect by introspection, since the faculty doing the inspecting is the one at fault. The only reliable sign is external and countable: how long since somebody told you something you did not want to hear, and what happened to them when they did.