Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection (8 page)

Driving past PetSmart one day, I remembered it was time to take my dog, Jumbo, in for some grooming. (It always
seems like grooming time for golden retrievers; they are cute shedding machines.) As I pulled into the parking lot, an idea popped up in my head. What if I asked the dog groomers to cut
my
hair instead? The idea made me laugh—making it exactly the kind of rejection attempt that I wanted.

When I walked into the store’s grooming area, four groomers were busily washing and trimming dogs. One of them stopped working and came over to greet me at the counter. After a few casual pleasantries, I asked how much it would cost for a hair trimming.

“What kind of dog?” she asked.

“How much would it cost to trim
my
hair?” I replied.

After a brief pause, she shook her head and said, “We don’t do that.” Then she burst out laughing.

“Then can you treat me like a German shepherd?” I asked. Then I remembered my Asian roots and appearance. “Actually, I am not German. Can you treat me like a Tibetan mastiff, or a chow chow or something?”

All four groomers started giggling.

“I’ll behave. You can tell me to sit, and I’ll sit and I won’t bark,” I said. I was on a roll.

“I’m sure you’ll be the best client we have,” the groomer joked back, laughing even harder.

I gave one last attempt before the rejection became final: “What about a manicure?” The groomers’ laughter became almost uncontrollable.

Leaving PetSmart, I felt a sense of satisfaction. I didn’t mind the no. In fact, I was feeling pretty good about myself because I figured I’d just made these groomers’ day.

But why didn’t I feel any pain or fear? How come my survival instinct hadn’t kicked in, and the opioids hadn’t started flowing? Why were they conspicuously silent this time?

I felt like I was onto something, and so I did some more research. It turns out that laughter has been linked to killing pain—literally.

There is a ton of anecdotal evidence that humor helps to reduce pain and stress—even among politicians, who are rarely known for their comedy. When heckled during a speech to the British Parliament, Ronald Reagan playfully replied, “Is there an echo in here?” Before going into surgery after his assassination attempt, he jokingly said to the surgeons: “I hope you are all Republicans.” On the other side of the political spectrum, when a reporter pointedly asked John F. Kennedy how he felt about the Republican National Committee’s adoption of a resolution that essentially called him a failure, he replied, “I assume it passed unanimously.” Mahatma Gandhi even said: “If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.”

Researchers have even proved that humor—and laughter specifically—can actually mitigate pain. In 2011, Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford University, ran an experiment in which he exposed participants to various degrees of pain by having them wear frozen wine-cooling sleeves on their arms or keep their legs bent ninety degrees while leaning against a wall, as if they were sitting on an imaginary chair. To determine their normal pain threshold, Dunbar measured how long participants could resist the pain before admitting that they couldn’t take it anymore.

Then he subjected participants to the same pain again,
but this time while showing them a variety of videos, from comedies such as
The Simpsons
and
South Park
, to neutral videos featuring pet training and golf, to documentaries meant to evoke good feelings, such as
Planet Earth
. He found that participants’ pain thresholds significantly increased only when they watched the comedies—and specifically when they laughed. On the other hand, neutral and feeling-good films made no difference. In another words, laughter reduced their pain and stress.

Dunbar believes that the power of laughter even has evolutionary roots. “Dr. Dunbar thinks laughter may have been favored by evolution because it helped bring human groups together, the way other activities like dancing and singing do,” wrote reporter James Gorman in the
New York Times
. 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.

So that explained why I didn’t feel much pain during the rejection attempts that left me laughing. The fear and pain that might have been generated by the experience were suppressed by endorphins because I was amusing myself simultaneously. In the case of my PetSmart adventure, I left feeling better about myself after being rejected.

In my search for the right stone to hurl at Goliath, I felt like I had stumbled on a good one. Laughter was not only good for me, but it quickly became one of my most effective weapons—my own evolution-based, biological weapon—for fighting off rejection pain and for helping me to stay calm and think on my feet.

Of course, humor has its limitations. Silliness isn’t appropriate in every real-life situation, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to rely on humor to help me through every rejection attempt—especially when the stakes are high and the outcomes have real significance. Also, endorphins address only the results of rejection—the pain. They don’t address the fear and the anticipation of rejection, which are the roots of rejection’s destructive power. But it also provoked another question: 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.

In the movie
The Wizard of Oz
, Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion went on an arduous journey to the Emerald City. They wanted to meet the “great and powerful” Wizard of Oz, who they hope will grant their wishes to return home, get a brain, receive a heart, and gain courage. When they visited the Wizard, they walked through a long creepy hallway, fighting the urge to run away. When they finally arrived in the room, they saw the Wizard as a menacing green-looking bald monster floating over a throne surrounded by fire, smoke, and steam. He spoke in a terrifying and threatening tone. He demanded that they set out on a mission and was so pushy and mean that he scared them senseless—so literally that the Lion actually lost consciousness.

After they finished the mission given by the Wizard, they returned to the Emerald City. As the Wizard carried on with his terrifying display, Dorothy’s little dog, Toto, trotted over to a large curtain in the corner of the room. He tugged it
down, suddenly revealing the real Wizard. He was a normal-looking gray-haired man operating an audio and visual machine to create the terrifying image in order to scare his visitors.

In reality, there was nothing frightening about this man—what became larger than life were the rumors, the mysteries, and the façade that the Wizard had constructed around himself. But what made it real was the way everyone else reacted to it.

My journey to meet and study rejection felt like Dorothy’s journey to the Emerald City. On that Southwest flight, I experienced the fear of public rejection in full force. I felt as though I was in that room meeting the terrifying and dangerous Wizard. But whenever I injected humor into my rejection attempts, I felt like I was peering behind the curtain to see the real Wizard, who was harmless and even funny. I was seeing rejection through a completely different lens.

Most of the time, when you really look at it, rejection is like the Wizard of Oz. We might be terrified of rejection when we’re asking for a raise, a date, an investment, or the approval we crave. We feel the word
no
comes at us with a loud voice, fire, and smoke. We feel it would really hurt us. But in reality, it is almost never that bad. Even if we don’t get what we ask for, we haven’t lost anything. It is rarely the case that our lives are in danger.

In my own life, I had never taken the time to get behind the curtain and see what rejection—my own “Wizard of Oz”—really was, until then.

Now I had to ask myself:
What is this thing that I’ve been fighting all my life? What exactly
is
rejection?

W
hen I began my rejection journey, I desperately wanted to slay my Goliath. Within a few weeks of searching for rejection, I could feel myself getting better at it. I hit a rejection groove, with each rejection seeming to get easier. One day I brought my own pork chop to a BBQ restaurant and asked to grill my own food. Another day I challenged a stranger to a staring contest. Neither experience left me sweating.

The further I got in my journey, the more I wanted to study and understand rejection so that I could apply what I was learning to the rest of my life. 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.

My blog made it easy for people to get in touch with me, and I was receiving dozens of fan e-mails per day. It was the beginning of 2013, the economy was still sluggish, and there was a lot of competition for seemingly every available job. Not surprisingly, a lot of people wrote to me to express both their frustration and their fear of rejection when it comes to searching for work. So I decided to do a job-related rejection attempt to see if I could learn something about how to make the job search easier. Moreover, by that time it had been years since I last looked for a job. I wanted to experience a job-search rejection firsthand so that I could help others with theirs.

I didn’t go the networking-application-interview route. Instead, I decided to simply show up at random office buildings with my résumé in hand and ask for a one-day job. The request felt a little bit awkward—who asks for a job lasting only one day? But my curiosity about what would happen far outweighed my nervousness.

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

In my first two stops, I was quickly turned away by stern-faced office managers. One of them even gave me a lecture on how I shouldn’t just drop in and needed to follow the formal application process. Undeterred, I walked into a third office building for one last try before calling it a day.

The office manager who greeted me had a smile that would put anyone, including potential job seekers, at ease.
Her name was Jennifer Carrier. After hearing my request, she didn’t kick me out. In fact, she wanted to know more about why I was asking for a job in the first place. I explained that as an entrepreneur I hadn’t looked for a job for a while, so I wanted to see if I could do it by dropping by an office. Then I did my best to convince her that I would be an excellent employee and would give my best effort to whatever job she would give me, whether it was online marketing—my specialty back at the Fortune 500 company I’d quit—or manual labor. In the end, I asked her to hire me as her personal assistant for one day. After some consideration, she gave me a provisional yes, adding that she would have to consult with her boss before it was official.

A few days later, Jennifer called. She presented me with an “offer” to work at her company for one day as an assistant office manager. The company was BigCommerce, an Austin-based technology firm that creates websites for small businesses. I would be helping Jennifer with her daily duties, such as greeting visitors, solving logistical issues for the office and its employees, and ordering lunch.

I took the offer and, a few days later, reported for duty. I spent the morning working with Jennifer. During an afternoon company meeting, I made another rejection attempt, asking the company’s managers to put my face on their website. Incredibly, a day later, my picture made its appearance.

Without the help of a recruiter or an agency, without filling out online application forms, without doing any sit-down interviews or handing over my references, I had found a job. And it had taken me only three tries. Sure, I wasn’t asking BigCommerce to make a long-term investment in me; getting a full-time job with a good salary and benefits is harder than volunteering somewhere for a day. But I felt like I had learned something about how to interact with prospective employers that I hadn’t known before.

It would be naive to give full credit to my strategy, to my persistence, or to any persuasive abilities I might possess; outside factors had played an equally if not more important role in the outcome. Namely, Jennifer, the office manager for BigCommerce, said yes to me, while most office managers wouldn’t. After getting to know Jennifer, I learned that she was known for her welcoming spirit, sense of humor, and love of adventure. When I interviewed her later to find out why she’d said yes, she told me that having a well-spoken man with a good résumé stop by the office looking for a one-day job had piqued her curiosity. But as we talked more, I realized that it was about much more than that.

Jennifer grew up in Massachusetts. Her father was a salesman who taught her to be inquisitive about people’s intentions and not to dismiss their requests. Her mom, who was from the South, taught her the value of hospitality. Being rather shy and quiet in high school, Jennifer was sent to modeling school for a year by her father. There, she learned
that a smile and a positive attitude could be just as important to a person’s appearance as his or her natural looks. In college, she worked in restaurants as a waitress to put herself through school. Being a waitress taught her to never say no to a customer’s request without first trying to find a solution.

All these experiences and perspectives made Jennifer who she was. And all of them were in play on the day that I knocked on her office door and asked for a job.

Jennifer was certainly the exception rather than norm, and the fact that I ran into someone like her on my third try, rather than the tenth or fifteenth, was a stroke of luck. Had I not run into Jennifer, I would have ended my rejection attempt with a no. There would have been no one-day job and no opportunity to share my learning with my viewers. On the other hand, I could have been even luckier and gotten Jennifer on my first try. In that case, I would have stopped after getting the first yes and possibly come to the misguided conclusion that most office managers welcomed strangers looking for jobs. I was grateful for the perspective that experiencing both possible outcomes had given me.

Through this experiment, I observed a very important fact: people could react to the same request very differently, and it said nothing about me. I was the same person posing the same question—“Can I work here for one day?”—to three different people at three different offices. Their responses reflected their own attitudes, sense of curiosity, and risk tolerance—which varied quite a bit among them.

A lot of people—including my pre-rejection experiment self—might lose confidence in themselves after getting a few rejections. Every time they ask for what they want, they
feel that the “universe” is making a unanimous judgment on their merits. But Jennifer helped me see that this couldn’t be true. The “universe” is made up of people with diverse and often polar-opposite personalities, incentives, and backgrounds. Their reactions to a certain request reveal much more about them than about the request itself.

I started to realize that 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.