During my second year of college, I developed a crush on a freshman girl. We spent nearly all week hanging out together. I asked her out on a date, and, in a very gentle and roundabout way, she rejected me.
I had been involved in a political advocacy student group. When election time came, I ran for President. I was outvoted. They gave me the option to drop down to the election for Vice President, which I took. I lost again. Then I dropped down to Treasurer. And lost.
I was very involved in theater on campus, having acted in numerous plays my freshman year. I applied to direct my own play the following year, and was rejected. I auditioned for two other plays, and didn’t make the cast list.
I had been very keen on becoming a residential advisor, thinking I had a lot to offer new students to help them adjust to college life. So I applied for that job—and was rejected. I was also looking for a summer internship, and became interested in management consulting. I applied, and was invited to interview. I felt like this was going to be my thing—they gave me a lot of positive encouragement, and I thought I would be great at it. After the interview, I got rejected.
Finally, before the February break, I “bickered” (rushed) for an eating club, Princeton’s version of Greek life (except instead of living together, you eat together). The process mostly involved games and icebreakers. I felt like I really fit in, I was making a good impression, I was on fire—then I got rejected.
My college career was halfway over, and it felt like everything I had been building had suddenly fallen out from under me. I felt talentless and unlikeable.
On a whim, I decided to get away from campus for the February break and visit a friend in Arizona. While hiking on a gorgeous mountain in the crisp desert air, I reflected on my winter of rejection. Why did it hurt so badly?
What we tell ourselves about rejection
I identified three reasons the rejections had particularly hurt:
1. I felt like I was being rejected as a person. The more I thought that a particular opportunity was the right fit for me, the more painful the rejection was. It was as if someone (an employer, a potential date) had asked “are you this type of person?” and I said “yes, yes! that’s me!” …and then they said “no, it’s not.” My identity had overlapped with the opportunity in exciting ways, and then my identity was called into question.
2. I wanted to be seen as someone who is naturally successful. I was always good at school, and I liked cultivating the image of someone who was naturally smart, who could get an A without studying that much. I wanted to be seen as the kind of person to whom things come easily. Adversity was fine, but only to the extent that it benefitted my narrative; in my obituary they’d write, “this one time he was rejected, but then he got something even better, and boy did he show them!” The series of rejections were ruining that narrative.
3. The rejections were the end of everything good in my life. Until then, life overall had been on an upward trajectory. Now, it felt like so many things I cared about were taken away from me. If I couldn’t even get a role in a play, that was the end of my acting career. If I couldn’t get that summer internship, when I thought my chances were so good, I wouldn’t be able to get another one. I couldn’t get a date with a girl who I thought liked me, I would never get another date.
Truths about rejection
As you can probably tell, none of these were quite true. They were gross exaggerations of a small grain of truth—lies I was telling myself that demotivated me from wanting to keep trying.
What I didn’t see at the time was that these rejections hadn’t made me weaker, they had made me stronger. I now had real-life evidence that being thoroughly rejected didn’t end the world.
Over time, I learned truths to counteract each of the above lies:
1. Rejections don’t imply anything significant about you as a person. As a thought experiment, imagine there’s an opportunity that you are truly the right fit for (if they accept you, you will excel). Now imagine they reject you. If, objectively, you would have been their best pick, then it cannot be that they rejected you because they took a holistic look at you and determined you’re not good enough. It must be because they didn’t look at you enough.
We often fear the judgment of people who know us least. Which is really silly, when you think about it—if they don’t know you well, they are likely missing the inside view of all your positive qualities. (For that reason, the people whose criticism I most listen to are the ones who know me best.)
For example, when I was on the other end of the job application process, I was shocked with how little time we took to review resumes. I was sent a file with over 150 resumes and had less than 2 hours to evaluate them all. If you do the math, that’s one resume per 48 seconds. 48 seconds! How can you judge someone in that amount of time? You can’t. In the end, most of my decisions were probably based on arbitrary phrases that stood out while skimming, or even my mood at the time. Behavioral economists have studied how something as simple as the time of day determines a judge’s willingness to grant a parole request.
2. Everyone encounters rejection (no matter how successful they seem). My wife’s great aunt is incredibly successful; she won the MacArthur “genius” grant for founding a free-standing birth center to help underserved women. When we went to visit her, the hallways of her apartment were covered in framed awards and certificates. When she showed us into the guestroom, we noticed about a dozen colored sashes hanging from a coat rack.
“What are those?” I asked.
“Oh, those are my honorary doctorates.”
But then she told us about her life, about the many years of work before the awards came in. About her grant applications that had been rejected. About the prominent people who had called her inept, who publicly criticized her. She worked each day to convince the medical establishment that she wasn’t crazy, that the birth centers she was supporting were even safer than hospitals for low-risk pregnancies, and that poor women deserved access to quality care. The awards and sashes only came at the end of the story, a sort of coda.
No one is “naturally” successful. Everyone who receives a lot of recognition spent a great deal of time not receiving a lot of recognition.
A couple of my favorite examples from the literary world: Khaled Hosseini, who wrote The Kite Runner, was rejected by over 30 literary agents. Frank Herbert, who wrote the seminal sci-fi novel Dune, was rejected by over 20 publishers (before he was finally published—by a company that printed auto repair manuals).
3. Rejections can be for the best. Not only did my winter of rejection not end everything good in my life, but it actually led to good. Scaling back my involvement in campus politics and theater helped me focus on other things I enjoyed a lot more.
That internship I applied to? I applied again the next year. This time, I was… rejected! But then I applied again the following year, for a full-time job after college, and was accepted.
That girl I asked out? We still spent a lot of time together. After many months, I felt like I was finally getting over her. But then, my heart would do somersaults every time we sat next to each other, and I gave up thinking we could be just friends. I asked her out again, and this time she said yes.
If I had never asked her out in the first place, we wouldn’t have dated, and gotten engaged, and I wouldn’t now be married to the most amazing woman in the world.
The ultimate superpower
Of course, not every rejection ends up being for the best. Sometimes you lose and you just have to try again. But would you rather end up having a track record of 100% success, or many accomplishments along with many failures?
In other words, what most impacts your life is not your shots-on-goal to goals ratio, it’s the number of goals.
Imagine you had no fear of rejection. That would be the ultimate superpower! You would be willing to try anything. You would put yourself in situations way “out of your league”—and sure, you may get rejected 99% of the time—but even winning 1% of the time would be enough to build an incredible life.
Weirdly, the only way to develop this superpower is to get rejected. A lot. Each time, the fear of getting rejected again diminishes a bit.
For that reason, the rejections you’ve received are not something to be ashamed of, they are something to be treasured. They are what got you to where you are, and what has built up your fledgling superpower of fearlessness.
My wife and I bought a little treasure chest. Every time we got rejected from a job opportunity, or a publication, or anything else, we printed it out and folded it and placed it in the treasure chest. We didn’t hide it; we displayed it proudly. It contained the sources of our strength.
This is a very important piece. I especially liked the section about why rejection can hit you so hard when it's tied up in identity. The rejection treasure chest is such a fun idea as well. Reminds me of the latest trend in tech world to hold 'fuck-up' nights to celebrate and learn from failures.
I want to make sure I understand the idea behind this sentence better. Raffi wrote: "what most impacts your life is not your shots-on-goal to goals ratio, it’s the number of goals." Is this a statistical reference to increasing your odds of success by adopting a large number of goals?
I love this, I think colleges should send this to all their students!