Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection (6 page)

I knew from experience that this fear can have enormous, debilitating consequences. Now I was hearing from people who, like me, viewed rejection as something so painful, so personal, and so negative that they would rather not ask for things, rather conform to the norm, and rather not take risks just to avoid the possibility of rejection. 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.

I once read a poignant memoir,
The Top Five Regrets of the Dying
, written by an Australian nurse named Bronnie Ware. She had interviewed dozens of terminally ill patients in hospice care and asked them about their deepest regrets.
The most frequent response she received was: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

What if we all had that courage? What if people didn’t feel so trapped by their fear of rejection? What if rejection didn’t feel so shameful and personal, but became more discussable? And what if we were able not just to talk about it, but to really figure out a way to conquer it?

If a person who fears rejection were suddenly unafraid of it, what might she be capable of? Wouldn’t she be better at
everything
she does? If she were an artist or musician and didn’t fear how people received her work, wouldn’t she be able to search deep into her soul and make pieces that truly reflect who she is? If she were a salesperson, wouldn’t she be able to call more prospects, follow up with more clients, and not get discouraged after a couple of nos? If she were a parent, wouldn’t she be able to raise her children based on her principles rather than giving them whatever they wanted? Wouldn’t a company or a nonprofit organization that didn’t feel overly worried about shareholder reactions have the courage to innovate new products and services that could make the world a better place?

All my life, I’d wanted to be an entrepreneur. I’d wanted to invent something that millions of people would find useful. Yet by tackling one of my own needs head-on, I’d accidentally stumbled on a need so great that it was shared by most of the planet.

Paul Graham, the entrepreneur and founder of the famous start-up accelerator Y Combinator, once wrote: “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.” All this time, I’d been focused on launching an app based on a cool idea in my head. But now, I saw far more meaning in helping people overcome their fear of rejection. I didn’t know exactly what that would look like—or what it would mean for my own future—but the rest of my 100 Days of Rejection would be the perfect lab for me to experiment with a new kind of invention: a way to overcome the fear of rejection.

Reading the e-mails from Mike, Regina, and others had put my sudden blast of fame in perspective. When my plane landed in Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, I hurried down the aisle, eager to get back to my family and tell them about my decision. As I stepped out of the plane and into the tunnel, feeling the cold wind, I felt just like I had on my first day of college, when I’d walked across that vast field of untouched snow. Circumstances had just presented me with one of the greatest opportunities of my life. Everything felt new. Everything felt possible.

M
aking the decision to stop building my app and completely change direction wasn’t easy, especially considering what I’d given up for that project and how much I valued my team. But when I told them the news, they were incredibly supportive. Like me, they’d been amazed by the amount of publicity and traction my blog had received, and they agreed that I’d stumbled on an even more meaningful endeavor. They felt like they’d contributed to it in a roundabout way and were very proud of it. We agreed that if I ever wanted to build technology related to the “rejection problem,” we would come back to work together again.

But now I had a new day job: confronting rejection full-time.

Immediately, it became clear to me that if I was really going to take on rejection on behalf of the world, then I
needed to supplement my rejection attempts with good old-fashioned research and learn as much about the topic as possible. I wanted to study this particular Goliath the way a sports team analyzes its opponent—by doing the equivalent of watching game tape, reading scouting reports, and practicing as much as I could before the real match.

My first online searches turned up almost nothing useful—mostly a swarm of inspirational quotes and superficial rah-rah talks by sales coaches and self-help gurus. Compared to related topics like success, charisma, leadership, negotiation, and even failure, I could find almost nothing that helped explain the subject of rejection and its relationship to our daily lives. What I found instead was a lot of advice that basically boiled down to this:

Well, sure—it would be great if everybody could operate that way. Our mainstream views on how to handle rejection are breathtakingly simplistic. Despite its prevalence and gut-wrenching consequence, we treat rejection as a one-off occurrence or temporary inconvenience—more like a bug bite or a flat tire than an experience that can shut down a person’s ability to take risks forever. It’s as if the subject were so simple that there was no need for more understanding. Didn’t get the job or promotion? Couldn’t close the sale? People thought your idea was stupid? The woman you love turns
down your proposal? Don’t take it personally! Dust yourself off and move on!

But if handling rejection were really that simple, why would a tabulation of Google search keywords, generated by billions of users, show that people rank rejection close to the top of their list of greatest fears, even above pain, loneliness, and illness? Why would people feel compelled to live up to others’ expectations while ignoring their own, making failure to pursue their dreams one of their biggest regrets? Why would I bury the blueprints for my shoe-skate invention in the bottom of a drawer after my uncle scoffed at the idea, only to later witness Heelys’s wild success?

Was I just weak? I didn’t think so. I had traveled to a foreign country alone as a teenager, knowing absolutely nobody and speaking no English. I’d had to overcome all kinds of obstacles to learn a new language and become familiar with a new culture. I had worked hard to get where I was, against big odds. If I were weak, I probably would have headed back to China years ago, having put my entire dream of living and working in America into a drawer.

The thousands of people all over the world writing to me, expressing how much they feared rejection, couldn’t be described as weak either. Experiencing a devastating rejection, such as losing a job you’ve held for decades, getting passed up for a promotion, or having your spouse push for a divorce when you don’t want to quit the marriage can be life altering. For people in these situations, saying “don’t take it personally” can feel insulting and ridiculous. But why does it bother us so much? The more I thought about it, the more I realized
I really had three burning questions: Why don’t we talk about rejection more? Why is rejection so painful? And why do we fear rejection so much?

There had to be more to it than what my searches were telling me. Figuring that there must be better advice and wisdom out there, I kept looking for answers. I explored the fields of business, psychology, history, sociology, self-help, and behavioral economics for any insights I could find—to the point of obsession. After a few weeks of research, with my desk now piled high with books and articles and my in-box flooded with Google News Alerts on the subject of “rejection,” I had taken tons of notes and was starting to feel like I was a professor in the school of rejection.

Maybe the biggest reason people don’t talk about rejection more is because they’d rather discuss its easier-to-manage conceptual cousin—failure. So many times, I’d start reading about rejection only to watch the text slide into a discussion of failure instead. But they aren’t the same thing. When we fail at something, such as a business venture or a career, it feels unfortunate but understandable and often tolerable, because it could be due to a host of factors. It’s easy to come up with reasons why something failed, whether they are logical reasons or simply excuses. If you fail at a business venture, you could reason that the idea was ahead of its time, that the market or the economy wasn’t conducive to success, or that the idea wasn’t well executed.

Even if it
was
your fault, there are all sorts of ways to turn
failure into a positive. You could say “I simply wasn’t good at it,” vow to get better, or remind yourself of the thousands of other things you’re amazing at. You could say “I made some mistakes”—because, after all, who doesn’t? You could say “I learned a lot from this” and come out actually feeling better, more experienced, and wiser than before you failed. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs sometimes even wear their failures like badges of honor. The entire lean start-up movement was built on the concept of developing products by failing fast and learning from those failures.

In fact, entrepreneurs
love
to tell and hear stories about failure—because those letdowns are often stepping-stones toward eventual success. Business celebrities such as Donald Trump brag about having failed plenty before becoming the moguls they are today. We watch athletes and sports teams fail one week or one season only to triumph the next. Failure has almost become a prerequisite to success. In some cases, it could feel as cool as having street cred.

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 means that we wanted someone to believe in us but they didn’t; that we wanted someone to like us but they didn’t; we wanted them to see what we see and to think how we think—and instead they disagreed and judged our way of looking at the world as inferior. That feels deeply personal to a lot of us. It doesn’t just feel like a rejection of our request, but also of our character, looks, ability, intelligence, personality, culture, or beliefs. Even if the person rejecting our request doesn’t mean for his or her no to feel personal, it’s going to. Rejection is an inherently unequal
exchange between the rejector and the rejectee—and it affects the latter much more than it does the former.

When we experience rejection, we can’t easily blame the economy, the market, or other people. If we can’t deal with it in a healthy manner, we are left with two unhealthy choices. If we believe we deserved the rejection, we blame ourselves and get flooded with feelings of shame and ineptitude. If we believe the rejection is unjust or undeserved, we blame the other person and get consumed by feelings of anger and revenge.

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.

In other words, 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. This is just a small window into human nature in a safe lab environment. Yet in real life, we are inundated with unfortunate and even tragic incidences of school shooting and acid attacks, all due to people’s desire for revenge after rejection.