Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection

by Jia Jiang

  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?

  CHAPTER 5

  RETHINKING REJECTION

  When 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.

  100 DAYS OF REJECTION: FINDING A JOB IN ONE DAY

  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.

  REJECTION IS HUMAN

  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 t
he 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.

  REJECTION IS AN OPINION

  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.

  100 DAYS OF REJECTION: GIVING APPLES TO STRANGERS

  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.

  REJECTION HAS A NUMBER

  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.

  JACOB: “What’s your number?”