Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible

by Jia Jiang

Was this a new sales strategy I was practicing? A dare? A social experiment? Actually, it was a little bit of each.

Giving up at the first sign of rejection felt much safer than putting my ideas out there to be further criticized. It was so much easier to do the rejecting all by myself.

I thought about what could have been. The pain and regret were unbearable.

miserably collecting good income.

“You can have another car, house, promotion, or job. But you can’t live with this kind of regret,”

There have been many moments in my life when I’ve realized that I married up. This was one of them.

Also, I felt oddly worried about my boss’s reaction. Apparently, my fear of rejection ran so deep that I was actually concerned that she’d reject my quitting. I didn’t want to upset her.

Before, I had failed to take a risk. Now, I had taken a risk and failed.

I started doubting my idea: The investor is an entrepreneurial veteran. If he thinks my company is not worth investing in, there must be some truth to it.

I started doubting myself, too: Who do you think you are? Who told you that you were ordained to be a successful entrepreneur? You are living a childish dream. Welcome to reality, my friend! Start-up success is for special geniuses like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. You are just like everybody else—a wannabe.

Then I started getting angry with myself: What the hell were you doing? How foolish were you, giving up a good job and diving...

The problem with insecurity is that you start feeling like everyone might reject you, even your closest loved ones.

Rejection Therapy—a game of sorts developed by a Canadian entrepreneur named Jason Comely, in which you purposely and repeatedly seek out rejection to desensitize yourself to the pain of the word no.

But this was rejection therapy, after all, and therapy is supposed to be painful.

Fear had turned me into a mumbling idiot.

Two days into my rejection journey, I had already learned my first big lesson: the way you ask a question—and how you follow through in the conversation—has an impact on the result you get. It might not change the outcome, but it can take a lot of the sting out of hearing no.

Projecting confidence and staying calm—rather than cowering—had created a totally different experience.

She told me I was too kind, then flashed a huge smile, the type you see only on someone who’s made another person happy.

So Tony Hsieh wants to hire me for a talent I never knew I had until today—in public speaking.

I’d always viewed my fear of rejection as some sort of rare disease, like guinea worm, that inflicts terrible pain but affects only a tiny segment of the overall population.

fear of rejection wasn’t a rare disease at all. It was a normal human condition.

Like me, they had spent much of their lives rejecting themselves before others could get the chance. As a result, they had heartbreaking stories of ambitions that weren’t fulfilled, job opportunities that were missed, love that was never realized—and inventions that were never made or were made by someone else. The worst part is that the “what ifs” that lingered in their minds were often caused by themselves, because they didn’t even ask or didn’t even try.

“The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.”

people rank rejection close to the top of their list of greatest fears, even above pain, loneliness, and illness?

For people in these situations, saying “don’t take it personally” can feel insulting and ridiculous.

Why don’t we talk about rejection more? Why is rejection so painful? And why do we fear rejection so much?

The entire lean start-up movement was built on the concept of developing products by failing fast and learning from those failures.

Rejection, on the other hand, is not cool at all. It involves another person saying no to us, often in favor of someone else, and often face-to-face.

Rejection is an inherently unequal exchange between the rejector and the rejectee—and it affects the latter much more than it does the former.

Kevin Carlsmith, PhD, a social psychologist at Colgate University, set up lab experiments where the participants experienced a perceived injustice. Some of the individuals were given the choice to reap revenge on their wrongdoers, but others were not. Afterward, Carlsmith surveyed participants’ feelings. Everyone who was given the chance to exact revenge took it. But everyone in the revenge group ended up feeling worse than the people who weren’t given the choice. Interestingly, all the members of the no-revenge-choice group believed they would have felt better had they been given the chance to get back at their wrongdoers.

people naturally want revenge after they’ve been rejected, perhaps thinking that they will feel better by showing the rejectors how wrong they were. Yet it doesn’t work that way, and those who lash out actually wind up feeling worse when they get revenge.

The participants’ brains, having experienced a social rejection, immediately started releasing opioids—just as they would if a physical trauma had occurred.

simply saying “don’t take it personally” is useless advice for anyone feeling rejected.

Numerous studies have shown that when it comes to avoiding objects or experiences that we instinctively judge to be harmful, our reaction times are much faster than they are when we’re confronted by harmless objects or experiences. In other words, if you come across a deadly looking spider, you’re going to clock a much faster sprint time running away from it than you could ever achieve if you were trying to outrun, say, a squirrel.

Fear, then, is required for our survival—

The fear of rejection may have saved many of our ancestors from getting tossed out of their social groups, but by and large it no longer makes sense in our modern lives.

Researchers have even proved that humor—and laughter specifically—can actually mitigate pain.

Laughing, dancing, and singing all produce endorphins—a different kind of opioid that not only fights pain but also makes us feel good. Laughing can be like receiving a double shot of natural painkillers from our brain.

If something can’t hurt me, then why should it scare me? It turned out it’s this question that proved to be pivotal in my fight with rejection.

So I started to increase the “fear factor” of my rejection attempts, making them more like real-life scenarios to see what I could learn. One of those rejection attempts in particular got the job done—literally.

When you are not afraid of rejection and it feels like you have nothing to lose, amazing things can happen.

rejection is a human interaction, with at least two parties involved in every decision. When we forget this—and see the people who say yes or no to us as faceless machines—every rejection can feel like an indictment, and every acceptance like a validation. But that’s just not the case.

REJECTION IS AN OPINION

Other people were simply processing my requests, then giving me their opinions. That opinion could be based on their mood, their needs and circumstances at that moment, or their knowledge, experience, education, culture, and upbringing over a lifetime. Whatever was guiding them at the time I entered their lives, these forces were usually much stronger than my presentation, my personality, or my request itself.

The way someone feels about me, or about a request I’m making, can be impacted by factors that have nothing to do with me. If people’s opinions and behaviors can change so drastically based on so many different factors, why should I take everything about a rejection so personally?

Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University. His bestselling books, Predictably Irrational and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty,

Behavioral economics is about the study of psychological, social, and emotional influences on people’s decision making.

If a bad idea like eating unwrapped food from a stranger isn’t universally rejected, do universally rejected ideas even exist? And if not, maybe that means that the only reason you get rejected from things is because you haven’t met the right person to say it yet.

I could often get a yes simply by talking to enough people.

I wondered how many times famous authors had been rejected by publishers before one of them finally accepted their first book. When I actually looked into it, the numbers were astonishing: • Lord of the Flies by William Golding: 20 • The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank: 15 • Carrie by Stephen King: 30 • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig: 121 (a record in the Guinness Book of World Records) • Dubliners by James Joyce: 22 • The Help by Kathryn Stockett: 60 • Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling: 12 • The Cuckoo’s Calling (J. K. Rowling using the pseudonym Robert Galbraith): at least one confirmed, allegedly many more