Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection (20 page)

Buddhism, Hinduism, and a host of other religions and philosophies promote the concept of detachment—of not taking anything that happens or doesn’t happen personally. In Karma Yoga, the scripture Bhagavad Gita says that “by working without attachment one attains the Supreme.” In
Tao Te Ching
, Lao Tzu wrote: “Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back, the only path to serenity.” In his book
The Success Principles
, author Jack Canfield, creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books, urges readers to “live with high intention and low attachment.”

Detachment shouldn’t necessarily be from your passion or your ideas, but it does help to detach yourself from the results and the possibility of rejection. Yet detachment from results isn’t something that most of us do well or even advocate. In society and in business, getting results—especially
short-term or instant results—seems to be the only thing many people care about and measure themselves against. Salespeople measure their success by the number of sales they make against other salespeople. CEOs are judged by the next quarterly earnings report. Scientists are judged by the number of publications they write. According to a LinkedIn study on what its users put on their online profiles, “results oriented” is one of the most common buzzwords people use, because they believe it’s what employers value the most. And they’re often right.

I’ve learned that being solely “results oriented” is more than shortsighted. It actually leads to worse results in the long run because it leaves you unprepared to get feedback that might help you along your way. During my journey, I started to see a clear distinction between things I could control and things I couldn’t. At first, I worried about the things I couldn’t control, such as people’s reactions and their perceptions of me. I would be extremely nervous and often gave out negative energy. Later on, when I started to give my full focus to what I could control, such as making eye contact, asking “why,” listening, not running after a no, I found myself becoming more effective and confident in everything I did. I became more fearless in approaching strangers and venturing into the unknown.

John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach who took UCLA to a record ten NCAA championships in a span of eleven years, never mentioned winning and losing to his team. If there was anyone who knew about winning, it was he. Yet his measurement of success for his players was effort based, not results based. It was whether they had prepared
thoroughly and played their best game, not beaten their opponent. That’s what my rejection journey taught me: to play my best, and not worry about the results—even when the stakes seem impossibly high.

Toward the end of my 100 Days journey, I felt some pressure to finish on a high note. Hundreds of people asked me what I would do for my hundredth request. “I don’t know,” I’d reply. “Hang out with Oprah?” I really wasn’t sure. By that point, I felt fearless. Because I didn’t care about the results, I was willing to ask for anything out of anybody at any time. Still, I wanted my hundredth request to be epic.

So I started a list of ideas. Here is a sample:

Then I turned this list into an online poll, asking others which one they thought I should try. The vast majority voted for interviewing President Obama, the most famous man in the Western world.

So I made a plan of attack. The thought was to try to generate a firestorm of social media buzz that would somehow get me on Obama’s radar. I’d use Twitter, create a YouTube video that would go viral, and start a petition and get thousands to sign it.

Ultimately, I did none of those things. The truth was that hanging out with famous people meant nothing to me. I’d already been on national TV. I’d met some of my favorite authors and business heroes. Plus, I didn’t want to put all that effort into what essentially would boil down to a PR stunt. My followers were putting a lot of pressure on me to “go big.” But I had to resist the urge to seek their approval.

So I quickly ended my Obama campaign and started something new. I wanted to put my hundredth attempt toward solving a real-world problem, one that regular people face every day, something that could really change someone’s life.

And I wanted that someone to be my wife. Ever since I’d quit my job to become an entrepreneur, Tracy had been my rock. Without her, I probably would have folded before I even started my rejection blog. In fact, I might not even have started it at all without her support. I went to bed every night thanking God that I married such an amazing woman.

And I knew that she had professional dreams of her own. Using my “rejection proof” skills to help her fulfill those dreams, just like she helped me to fulfill mine, felt like the perfect way to end my 100 Days.

So one night I asked her: “If you could work for any company in the world, what would it be?” She didn’t even have to think about it. “Google!” she said.

Helping Tracy get into Google? Now that’s a cause I could go all out for. I loved the idea because:

One, it would be extremely hard. With its theme-park-style office buildings, free gourmet food, on-site massages, volleyball courts, and other legendary perks, Google goes out of its way to create a great environment for its employees.
Fortune
magazine consistently ranks Google as the number one place to work in America. But because it’s so desirable, millions of people apply for a Google job every year, and it is notoriously tough to become one of the chosen few. In fact, Google’s acceptance rate is below 0.5 percent, more than ten times lower than that of Harvard. To get in, Tracy would need to beat out at least two hundred other applicants.

Two, there are few things in life that people associate more with rejection than a job search. If I could use the principles I’d learned to help Tracy “rejection proof” her way into Google, it could be the ultimate rejection attempt.

Three, Tracy needed it badly. Although she had been rated as a star performer and was highly respected by her colleagues, her company was in an industrywide decline. Many of her coworkers had been laid off, including her boss and some of her closest friends. It’s tough to keep your spirits up when working in a struggling environment. You never know what’s going to happen next. Tracy needed a career change.

And so there it was, my final challenge. I would go all out coaching and guiding Tracy into a job at Google. We dubbed the project “Finding Google,” after the Pixar animation film
Finding Nemo
.

It was a scary proposition, because just like building a company, getting into Google couldn’t be done in a half
measure. To fully embrace the project, Tracy would need to embrace the risk as well. We decided she should quit her current job and focus 100 percent on the new job search. It would be time-consuming, risky, but fun. Financially and emotionally, we gave ourselves six months to get her a job at Google—the same amount of time she’d given me to launch my start-up.

A job search is a big project, full of ups and downs, rejections and acceptances. So we started by listing the things she could control, including networking, improving her résumé, applying for jobs, and preparing for interviews. Then we listed the things she couldn’t control, such as getting an answer from a networking request, securing an interview, having people like her in the interview, and getting a job offer. We vowed to adhere to the core of the rejection-proof principle to detach ourselves from the results while going all out with our effort.

Every day, Tracy would relentlessly focus on her controllable tasks. She sent out dozens of requests to current and former Google employees for phone conversations. They included people in her school network, her former colleagues, and complete strangers. She was always very up front with her intention—asking them to help her find a job at Google. She quickly learned, like I had learned, that it’s amazing how nice and helpful people can be if you are honest and just ask. Almost half her requests turned into phone conversations.

During those conversations, Tracy made sure to stay 100 percent authentic to who she was, instead of trying to act a certain way to make people like her. Some people loved her and expressed their desire to help, while others didn’t. Tracy
tried not to be fazed by phone conversations that went badly or e-mails that were never returned. She focused on the task at hand—and on being herself.

Soon, she started receiving interview requests from Google recruiters, mainly due to referrals from the Googlers Tracy talked to on the phone. There were phone screens first by the recruiters, then by hiring managers, and then by the hiring managers’ colleagues. Tracy prepared hard for these interviews, and we would practice over and over again on how to remain calm and be the best she could be. Still, she kept losing out. In one month, Tracy was turned down for three different positions, all for different reasons. Google doesn’t give out specific feedback after interview rejections. In one case, Tracy was pretty sure that someone hadn’t liked the way she answered a few of the interview questions. In another case, someone didn’t think she had the right experience for the job.

Rejection is hard on anyone’s emotions, so at first I saw my main job as making sure Tracy would not be negatively affected by it. I urged her to explore every ounce of rejection’s upside. “Never waste any rejection,” I told her. She could use each rejection as feedback, as a learning tool, and as motivation to keep on trying.

Tracy got it, and she quickly became a rejection-proof expert herself. When the second and third rejections came in, I was more affected than Tracy, and she was the one keeping my spirits up. In fact, I felt so protective of her that I was enraged by some of the reasons. What do they mean she didn’t answer the question precisely? Why did they interview her in the first place if she didn’t have the experience?

“Calm down,” Tracy would say with her soft voice, the same voice she used when putting our son, Brian, to sleep. “Rejection is just an opinion, remember? It reflects them more than me, right?” I agreed.
Wow
, I thought.
Who’s the coach now?

Then, finally, a fourth interview came. This time, the job description fit perfectly with her experience, and she had a fantastic phone interview. Google flew her to their headquarters in Mountain View, California, for an on-site interview. There, she faced a whole team of Googlers, all well prepared with their questions, asking her about every bit of her experience and skills. She came back from the trip exhausted and told me that she really didn’t know if she’d done well or not, because she’d had a hard time reading cues from her interviewers, who gave nothing away.

I asked her, “Were you on time?” She said yes.

“Did you answer every question to the best of your ability?” She said yes.

“Were you yourself and not pretending to be someone else?” She answered yes again.

“Then there is nothing to worry about,” I assured her. “You did well on everything that you could control. And that’s a win!”

One week later, Tracy received an e-mail from the recruiter. We opened it together. Its content and structure were all too familiar. “Thank you for interviewing with us. Unfortunately we decided on another direction….”

Another rejection.

“Well, at least it was fast this time,” Tracy said, forcing a smile. By now, she’d sent out hundreds of conversation
requests, had countless phone conversations, and four formal interviews. She’d focused on everything she could control and let everything she couldn’t control fall as it may. But so far, what she couldn’t control had all resulted in rejection.

I tried to hide my disappointment. “Let’s take a break,” I suggested. “You worked too hard for this. We need to have some fun, too. We need to keep celebrating rejections.” So that night, we went out on a date, the first one we’d had since Tracy quit her job. We toasted to rejection, over and over. Deep down, though, I was hurting, because I wanted it so badly for Tracy. It’s tough to be rejection proof when it’s not you getting rejected, but your loved one.

Two days later, Tracy and I headed to the library, where she would resume her job search project. Along the way I stopped at Starbucks to get her a coffee. On my way back to the car, I saw her talking on the phone. She had a smile on her face that could melt the coldest snow in the world. She hung up just as I opened the door.

She looked at me, with an even bigger smile and with tears in her eyes. “Google changed their mind. They just offered me a job!”

I don’t remember what I said afterward, but I do remember hugging her for a long, long time. I remember the pride I felt for this woman. I remember the tears of joy on my face.

Rejection, indeed, is just an opinion. It is so feeble it can even change. It also has a number. In Tracy’s case, that number was four, although it felt to us both like four hundred.

I later had a chance to talk with the Google recruiter who had ultimately found Tracy her job. He first corrected me about the size of her competition. In fact, thousands of people
applied for the job, not hundreds. But something about Tracy had stuck with him. “Tracy had accomplished a lot in her former job, but was very down to earth and humble,” he explained. “She also asked for my advice and trusted me. That meant a lot to me personally as a recruiter.”

As for the initial rejection, here’s what he said: “Everyone liked her during the interview. For some reason, the team didn’t go forward with it. I was so affected by it myself. I remember writing the e-mail and feeling terrible…. But the thing was, she took it so well. I’ve never seen anyone who could take it so positively—never. She even said, ‘Please keep me in mind if there are other positions that would fit me.’ It made me realize how much she wanted Google, even after all these rejections. That broke my heart…and I wanted to advocate for her.”

A short time later, the recruiter went back to the team, asking if they had found anyone for the job. They hadn’t. So he proposed that they reconsider Tracy. “They said they had interviewed tons of people by then, but still also couldn’t get Tracy out of their mind,” he said. “Eventually, they decided to reverse course and offer Tracy the position…. With my years of experience of being a recruiter, I’ve never seen that happen…. The moral of the story was, treat everyone nicely, even when they say no.”

Looking back, getting into Google was very hard, but not impossible. After all, Google has tens of thousands of employees, and they all got in somehow. Moreover, Tracy was an accomplished professional in her own right. There was a
chance she would have landed a Google job anyway by herself and through her own job search methods.

Maybe trying to meet Obama or partying with a rock star would have been a more spectacular way to end my 100 Days of Rejection. But I would not have traded this experience for anything else. I got to use everything I learned to help an amazing woman fulfill her dream. For me, there is no bigger prize than that.