Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection (9 page)

This job-seeking experience also sparked another paradigm shift. From that point on, rejection seemed less like “the truth” and more like 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.

People often use the phrase “everyone is entitled to their own opinion.” In fact, everyone has opinions—sometimes very strong ones that they can’t wait to share. Ranging from politics to people and from food preferences to music taste, our opinions couldn’t be more diverse. If I accepted every
opinion equally and used it to judge the merit of something, not only would I change my mind constantly but I would probably eventually lose it.

Throughout history, many great ideas that ultimately propelled humanity forward were initially met with vocal, violent, and even gruesome rejection by society at large. They include the movements led by Socrates, Galileo, Joan of Arc, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr. Even the foundation of Christianity was formed by the rejection of Jesus by his own people.

Moreover, people’s opinions change over time, across regions, and are heavily influenced by social, political, and environmental factors that are outside any one person’s control. People are susceptible to the societal pressures that encourage (or demand) that they behave in a certain way.

Yale social psychologist Stanley Milgram designed one of the most famous, if not notorious, experiments, called the Milgram Shock Experiment, to demonstrate just how influenced people can be by the presence of an authority figure. In the experiment, an actor who wore an authoritative looking lab coat ordered research participants to give out a fake electric shock to another actor in the adjacent room, pretending to be a fellow research participant. Not knowing the shock was fake and the experiment was staged, the participant would follow the order and deliver shocks, often to the maximum and life-threatening level. The experiment was so profound because it showed that people would say yes in the name of following orders from authorities.

Outside influences have an enormous impact on the way people see a situation—and those influences can change over
time. 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? This simple but profound realization helped me to start taking the emotion out of rejection—and to look with new eyes at the decisions people make.

I decided that I wanted to use 100 Days of Rejection as an experiment to test out whether it was possible for an idea to be deemed universally good or bad. I wanted to create a rejection attempt where I offered people something that I would never accept myself, and that I was sure no other person would ever accept. Would it be possible that someone else would have such a different opinion that the person might find it acceptable?

Coming up with a rejection idea along these lines was harder than it sounds. So I called someone renowned for his ability to design wacky social experiments—Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University. His bestselling books,
Predictably Irrational
and
The Honest Truth About Dishonesty
, are filled with such experiments. I’d taken one of Dan’s classes when I was a graduate student and found him to be one of the funniest and most thoughtful people I’d ever encountered. Behavioral economics is about the study of psychological, social, and emotional influences on people’s decision making. If I wanted to run a social experiment related to human behavior, Dan was the first person I’d call for advice.

So I called him up. I told him about the amazing and
wild rejection journey I’d been on. Then I asked if he had any ideas about how to come up with a rejection attempt that nobody would ever say yes to.

Dan not only loved my story, but also quickly started churning out wacky ideas for me to try. One of his ideas immediately struck me as brilliant, and I decided to give it a go.

From the book of Genesis to the fairy tale of Snow White, from the Halloween trick-or-trick urban legend about razors-in-apples to every responsible mom’s advice, taking an apple from a stranger has always been a very bad idea.

So I bought some apples from a store, then offered them to strangers in a parking lot. I named my blog entry “Evil Queen and the Six Snow Whites.” I would be the evil queen giving away apples. And no way any “Snow Whites” would bite. Right?

To find out, I headed to the parking lot of my local Target, positioned myself on the sidewalk near the exit doors, and started offering apples to shoppers. Not surprisingly, most people turned me down right away. One woman even had a conversation with me about why she was so scared by an offer like this, citing food safety and emotional concerns. She looked traumatized when she recalled to me a restaurant experience where someone had tampered with her food.

However, one well-dressed woman really blew my mind. When I offered her an apple, she said: “OK, thanks!” She took the apple and walked away like nothing strange had happened. A couple of steps later, she bit into it.

I almost fell to the ground as if I’d bitten a poisonous apple myself. How could anyone just eat food from a stranger without a second thought?

I regret not chasing after her and asking why she took the apple. But whatever the reason, I knew her decision had to be based on a judgment that she made of me. She had sized up the stranger with the bag of apples and the crazy offer, and formed the opinion that accepting the apple would be OK. Maybe there were factors that I couldn’t know about that made my offering seem more appealing—she might have missed a meal, or been trying to eat more fruit, or maybe she just thought I looked too friendly to have tampered with the food.

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.

One of my favorite bits of movie dialogue is from
Money Never Sleeps
, the sequel to the classic film
Wall Street
, when the young hero, Jacob Moore, confronts the corporate villain, Bretton James, on his shady business ethics and voracious appetite for money.

Through my rejection experiments, I began to realize that I could often get a yes simply by talking to enough people. Obviously, not every rejection attempt would ultimately yield a yes, especially some of the wackier ones. But I was surprised by how many times my persistence paid off—like it had with the apple experiment, and with my attempt to land a one-day-only office job. It made me wonder: Do rejections also have a “number”? If you ask enough people for something enough times, will you eventually find someone to say yes?

When it comes to persistence, one group of people who are constantly coming up against rejection are people who work in creative fields. EJ, a fiction author, e-mailed me with a rejection challenge:

“I’m an author and I would love to work with you on the next Rejection Therapy video,” she wrote. “I see writers get rejected every day; most writers carry tons of rejections and never get accepted by these big intimidating publishing houses. I think it would send quite a message, and probably go viral in the extremely large literary community, to walk up to the publishers, in their building and onto their executive floor, hand these guys a manuscript, and ask them, ‘Can you publish my book?’ ”

While that experiment never came to fruition, EJ’s letter
did make me think more about the life of a writer. 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:

It wasn’t just the numbers, either; some of the feedback these authors received from the rejecting publishers was extremely harsh:

“The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which could lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.”—on Anne Frank:
The Diary of a Young Girl

“An absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.”—on
Lord of the Flies

“We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.”—
on Carrie

“It’s far too long for children”
—on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

J. K. Rowling’s rejections are especially fascinating. In 1995, she submitted her first Harry Potter manuscript to twelve British publishers and was rejected by all of them. Then the head of one publisher, Bloomsbury, handed the manuscript to her granddaughter, who couldn’t put it down until she finished reading the entire thing. Bloomsbury finally gave Harry Potter the green light a year later. Had the little girl not loved the story, Harry Potter might have landed in the shredder, and his epic battle with You-Know-Who would have never happened.

More than a decade later,
Harry Potter
sold over 100 million copies and became one of the top ten bestselling books in history. J. K. Rowling sent out the manuscript of her new book,
The Cuckoo’s Calling
, to publishers under a pseudonym because she wanted her work to stand on its own merit rather than on her fame. The editor who read and rejected the book, which would also become a bestseller, had said it was “quiet” and “didn’t stand out.”

All these rejections have now become jokes and inspirational tales because of how successful the books and authors went on to be. But I suspect that every no these authors received discouraged—maybe even devastated—them. It’s hard not to wonder how many would-be masterpieces have never seen the light of day because the creators were so discouraged
by the rejections and negative opinions and stopped trying.

All these authors—many of whom are now considered to be the greatest talents of their days—had to push beyond dozens of rejections until they found the right person who agreed to publish their work. It’s as if becoming a master of a craft requires not just great skills, but also the ability to weather rejections to get to an acceptance—not to mention an unfailing belief in themselves and their own work.

No matter how good or bad the work is, there is no mathematical way for everyone in the world to accept or reject it. But if acceptance is the only thing a person strives for, all she or he needs to do is to talk to enough people. Odds are that someone will eventually say yes.

Of course, not all acceptances are created equal. Not every book idea will lead to a giant bestselling franchise the way that J. K. Rowling’s did; there is good and bad, after all. However, thinking about all those authors who had believed so much in their work that they kept trying to find a publisher after so many painful rejections made me realize how important it was to believe in what I was doing. Rejection is human, is an opinion, and has a number. If I viewed other people’s opinions as the main judgment of merit—which is what I was doing when I took every rejection to heart—then my life would be a miserable mess. I’d be basing my self-worth, and even the course of my life, on the whims and judgments of other people.

All these years, rejection had scared me like Goliath. It stopped me from pursuing my dreams for over a decade. It sometimes stopped me from reaching out or even saying
“hi” to others for fear of rejection and judgment. But now that I was studying Goliath, and seeing him with new eyes, it felt as if I might have him cornered. Without the fog of pain and fear, rejection wasn’t the Goliath that I’d thought it was. Instead, it was more like the Wizard of Oz. It didn’t have to be my enemy—if I didn’t let it scare me to death.