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

by Jia Jiang

  This wasn’t my last lecture—it was my first. But I dressed up for the occasion as well, in my favorite shirt, like Monsieur Hamel did. In the class, I discussed how because people resist change, especially when it comes to power and tradition, the most important ideas and movements often encounter the most violent rejections. I cited examples of Apostle Paul and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and how they turned rejections into opportunities, and changed the world as a result. I encouraged the students not to give up easily in the face of nos, and to be smart to obtain yeses.

  When the class was over, the students gave me a warm round of applause, and Professor Rollins engulfed me in a hug (now that was a surprise!). My wife, Tracy, was also there. As we walked out of the classroom together, I was wiping away tears. I felt my grandma’s spirit was there in that classroom watching me that day. And I knew she was proud of me.

  —

  It was tough to analyze myself after such an emotional episode. To this day, I still can’t believe that things that mean so much to me could happen that fast if I just asked for them. However, I know I did one thing that helped me, and it was one of the most important lessons I learned through my 100 Days of Rejection: target the right audience.

  Before meeting Professor Rollins, I had spent days working on the lecture material I would be giving to hypothetical college students in a hypothetical class. I’d pictured myself as a professor, channeled my family tree, and put in my best work. I did all this without knowing if my presentation would ever be given or even seen by anyone. I also dressed the part and prepared a polished résumé that highlighted my experience—both of which brought me credibility during my encounter with Professor Rollins. I proved that I wasn’t just a crazy guy with a crazy wish, or a jokester looking for a laugh.

  Yet however well prepared I was, I knew the odds of convincing a professor to let a stranger lecture to his students were very low. To increase those odds, I aimed my request at what I hoped would be the most receptive audience. Thinking that the business school would probably value my message the most, I started there. When that didn’t work out due to unfortunate timing, I moved to my next best choice—the communications school. Professor Rollins welcomed me with open arms, and so did his students. But had I picked a professor from the school of nursing, I might have gotten a swift rejection.

  In other words, targeting is everything.

  A few years ago, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten staged an intriguing experiment that quickly went viral. He asked Joshua Bell, a Grammy Award–winning violinist and conductor, to play his violin in a busy DC metro station dressed like a normal street fiddler. Bell is one of the most accomplished violinists in the world, and people pay hundreds of dollars to attend his concerts. Weingarten had him playing anonymously for a pack of busy commuters. Would they stop, recognize his genius, and count their lucky stars for being able to listen to a masterful performance for free? Or would they take no notice?

  Wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a baseball cap, Bell gave his best effort. During his forty-five-minute subway performance, 1,097 people passed by the spot where Bell was playing. Only seven stopped to listen, and only one recognized Bell.

  Many attributed the results to the commuters’ lack of interest in classical music or their narrow focus on their travel logistics. Another reason was Bell’s anonymity—and thus his lack of credibility.

  However, no one can deny the fact that the performance was targeted at the wrong audience. Just days before, Bell had performed at the prestigious John F. Kennedy Center to a standing ovation. The contrast couldn’t be more stunning.

  —

  Of course, it’s hard to draw a direct comparison between me trying to sell my first-ever attempt at teaching and a world-class violinist doing what he knows best. However, both these examples demonstrated the principle of targeting. It doesn’t matter how amazing your performance or products are, if you target the wrong audience, who don’t recognize, appreciate, or need your value, your effort will be both wasted and rejected.

  LESSONS

  1. Give My “Why”: By explaining the reason behind the request, one has a higher chance to be accepted.

  2. Start with “I”: Starting the request with the word “I” can give the requestor more authentic control of the request. Never pretend to think in the other person’s interests without genuinely knowing them.

  3. Acknowledge Doubts: By admitting obvious and possible objections in your request before the other person, one can increase the trust level between the two parties.

  4. Target the Audience: By choosing a more receptive audience, one can enhance the chance of being accepted.

  CHAPTER 8

  GIVING A NO

  After weeks filled with rejection attempts, it became a fun routine to get up every day looking for new ways to be rejected. There was still some fear here and there. But I was learning a tremendous amount about psychology, negotiation, and persuasion. And the challenge of constantly experimenting and testing out my growing knowledge—then sharing it with readers—still felt exhilarating. By Jiro Ono’s measure, I was ready to start serving egg sushi to customers.

  Still, I found myself wondering if I was nearing some sort of peak—if the rate of my learning might slow down because I’d squeezed all the learning there was out of rejection.

  That might have been true, if not for a minicrisis that was brewing in my life.

  I was still getting lots of e-mails and comments from readers and viewers through social media, and sorting through all of them had become a full-time job all its own. I truly felt honored that so many people wanted to share their life stories with me, or ask me questions about my experiences. I appreciated them reaching out and really enjoyed the interaction and learning that came from helping others.

  But because I’d gone so public with my fight with rejection—and had become a pretty vocal advocate of not being afraid to ask for things—I also found myself on the receiving end of a lot of requests. People started asking me for personal coaching sessions, for jobs, and to enter into business partnerships with them. Some of the requests were pretty outlandish. One person asked me to market his produce, and another wanted to hang out with me at his house for a weekend. Many of these requests started with, “Jia, since you taught me not to be afraid of rejection, here is my own version of rejection therapy. Would you [insert request]?”

  At first, I said yes to everything that seemed doable. But as time went on, fulfilling these requests started to dominate my life. I had less and less time for my blog, my family, and myself. The sheer volume of requests started to weigh on me, and it made me less enthusiastic in my responses. With so many people wanting something from me, sometimes I said yes but didn’t do a great job of following through, and that bothered me, too.

  Eventually, I realized that I had to start saying no to people just to restore balance to my life. And that wasn’t fun at all.

  Given my lifelong fear of rejection, it is probably no surprise that I have never liked saying no to people. Being the person doing the rejection didn’t feel much better to me than being on its receiving end. In fact, it made me feel like a jerk. Once I got deep into my rejection journey, saying no also made me feel like a hypocrite. Here I was, teaching people to ask for what they want and then not saying yes to them. I hated it.

  Moreover, I was really, really bad at saying no. People would send me letters or requests that were paragraphs long. Replying with a short and quick “sorry, I can’t do it” felt disrespectful by comparison. But matching the time and effort they put into crafting these requests was impossible. I simply didn’t know what to do.

  Bad habits set in. I started delaying my responses, telling myself that I’d get to them later. Sometimes I would forget about them altogether. But in my mind, I always had that nagging feeling that I owed some people something, and many times I had a hard time sleeping because of it. Soon, whenever I received an e-mail from someone that contained a request, I felt dread rather
than excitement.

  One day I happened to be visiting a college friend. It had been a decade since we had last seen each other, and we were both very happy to be meeting up. Back then, she’d shared with me her dream of becoming a mom and running her own nonprofit organization for women in need. She had finished both college and graduate school with that latter aim in mind. Sure enough, she was now the mom of two beautiful daughters. While she didn’t run her own nonprofit, she volunteered with several organizations doing social good. But she was far from living her dream.

  My friend confided with me how much she had to do as a volunteer. The organizations she worked with all had great intentions and noble goals, but the people in charge would often rather have someone else do the hard work—specifically, her. When they asked her to put in more hours than her fair share, she didn’t know how to say no. But when she took on everything, her resentment would start to build. Whenever she did manage to say no, it confused her coworkers because it was not consistent with what she had done in the past. This dilemma had soured her on the work she was doing—and even on her dream. She told me she was ready to quit and take a break from it all.

  My friend’s revelation shocked me, not only because it was sad to see her unhappy but also because of how similarly we felt about not being able to say no to others’ well-intentioned requests. I realized that if I didn’t get a handle on my reluctance to reject people, then I might end up wanting to quit as well. I might even accidentally sabotage the work that I was doing—because at the root of the problem was the same issue I’d been battling all along: my fear of rejection. I wasn’t afraid to say no. I was afraid of people’s reactions—specifically, their disappointment and anger. Put another way, I was afraid they would reject me because of my rejection.

  So I started looking back through my videos, examining how all the people I’d approached had delivered their rejections. I quickly found out that not all rejections were created equal. There were good rejections and bad rejections. Some of the people who had rejected me had been harsh and dismissive, but others had said no with such finesse and kindness that they managed to make me like them despite their nos. These “good” rejectors had something to teach, and I watched those videos again and again until I had fully absorbed their lessons.

  100 DAYS OF REJECTION: EXCHANGE SERVICES WITH A PERSONAL TRAINER

  One of the videos I studied the most was the rejection attempt I made with a personal fitness trainer named Jordan.

  In ancient times, before the introduction of currency, bartering was one of the main systems people used to exchange goods and services. In today’s world dominated by credit cards and digital transactions, I wondered if bartering would still work even in isolated instances. So I turned it into a rejection attempt.

  My goal was to get a personal trainer to give me an hour of free training without me joining his gym. In exchange, I would offer to spend an hour teaching him everything I’d learned about entrepreneurship and blogging.

  I walked into a local 24 Hour Fitness and started looking around for my target. That’s when I spotted Jordan, a tall, young guy with bulging biceps.

  Jordan listened patiently to my request to exchange services, then quickly explained that he couldn’t accept the trade because of company policy, which prevented him from giving out free trainings. But Jordan was a helpful guy. He suggested that if I joined 24 Hour Fitness as a member, I could get a free hour of training as part of the gym’s “fitness orientation.”

  I didn’t want to join the gym—that would sort of defeat the purpose. So I made a strategic retreat and tried a different approach. “If you can’t do it here, can we go somewhere else to do this?”

  Jordan shook his head, looking truly sorry. He’d signed a noncompete clause, he told me, and would get fired for doing training anywhere outside the gym on his own.

  I definitely didn’t want to get Jordan fired. But before leaving, I did want to know whether my original offer was valuable to him at all. “Are you interested in entrepreneurship and blogging?” I asked.

  “No. I’m really not. I’m pursuing a firefighting career,” Jordan replied.

  “That’s a great career,” I told him, and I meant it. “I have huge respect for firefighters. They are heroes!”

  “Thanks, I appreciate that,” Jordan replied. Then he did something totally unexpected.

  “I have a card of a friend who has her own gym,” he told me. “I know they have trainers in there so you can always stop by. They are not under contract with any other gym, and they are a private entity. Maybe they can do it.”

  He found his friend’s business card and handed it to me. I called the number on the card and soon found myself with an offer to work out for free at his friend’s gym.

  Jordan’s generosity wasn’t what stuck with me. What amazed me was the way he’d rejected my initial request. He wasn’t dismissive, even though my request held no interest for him. He heard me out, and showed that he was taking me seriously by giving me real reasons why the request wasn’t going to work. He made me feel valued by pulling out his problem-solving skills and doing what he could to help me get what I wanted. Jordan’s no felt very much like a yes. Indeed, Jordan had delivered a “perfect rejection.”

  PATIENCE AND RESPECT

  What impressed me the most about Jordan was his attitude toward me as a person. No matter how many times or how many ways I tried to get what I wanted, his demeanor remained calm and respectful—and it’s hard to be unhappy when the other person is being nice the whole time. Being patient and respectful when saying no is such a simple concept. But it’s amazing how often we don’t put it into practice.

  Consider the story of Kelly Blazek, a marketing and communications executive. A few years ago, Blazek created the Cleveland Job Bank, a Yahoo! group that helps connect Cleveland-based marketing and communications job seekers with jobs in their field. The group has more than seventy-three hundred subscribers, many of whom have Blazek to thank for helping them find a job. Her work was even recognized by the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), one of the most prestigious organizations in her field. In 2013, IABC named Blazek “Communicator of the Year.”

  Given all this, it’s hard not to picture Blazek as a warm and helpful person and a great communicator. But in early 2014, Blazek shot to Internet notoriety when a nasty e-mail she sent went viral.

  In response to a stranger’s request to connect on LinkedIn, Blazek went ballistic.

  “Your invite to connect is inappropriate, beneficial only to you, and tacky,” she wrote. “Wow, I cannot wait to let every 26-year-old jobseeker mine my top-tier marketing connections to help them land a job.” And that was just the warm-up. “I love the sense of entitlement in your generation,” she continued. “You’re welcome for your humility lesson for the year. Don’t ever reach out to senior practitioners again and assume their carefully curated list of connections is available to you, just because you want to build your network…. Don’t ever write me again.”

  The recipient of Blazek’s blazing rejection e-mail was Diana Mekota, a job seeker who planned to move to Cleveland and had been looking into joining Blazek’s Yahoo! group. Obviously, Mekota was not happy about the letter. She published it on Twitter and Reddit, where thousands of people viewed it. They blasted Blazek for her arrogance and rudeness, and many even categorized her letter as cyberbullying. Other letters that she had written started to emerge, like this one, to someone who had failed to indicate what industry the person was in: “Am I a mind reader?…I promise to deny any requester who made me guess what they do. Congratulations—you’re another one.”

  And this one, sent in response to an applicant who complained about her tone: “Since my tone is so off-putting, I think you’ll be happier with the other Job Bank in town. Hint: there isn’t one. You have a great day.”

  Facing a landslide of scrutiny, Blazek had to publicly apologize to Mekota and delete all her social media accounts. She even retur
ned her 2013 “Communicator of the Year” award to IABC.

  It was hard not to compare what had happened to Blazek to what had happened to Jackie and me with our “Olympic donuts” moment. Magnified by the power of social media, the rude rejection cost Blazek her reputation and trashed the goodwill she’d spent years building as a volunteer. By contrast, Jackie’s kindness in response to my request had the opposite effect, letting the whole world see just how amazing she was.

  Of course, the difference between a good interaction and a bad one isn’t always so dramatic. Sometimes the two are separated by nothing but a smile. At one point during my rejection journey, I visited a bookstore and asked two clerks if I could borrow a book instead of buying one. They both said no and explained the obvious reason. But one of them said it with a grumpy and annoyed look, adding, “I don’t know what else to tell you.” The other person said it with a smile. Next time I need to ask a question at a store, I’m certainly going to look for somebody with a smile on their face!

  Showing patience and respect can soften the blow of rejection, and sometimes even earn the other person’s respect and understanding. But a snarky attitude yields the opposite. It inflicts unnecessary harm on the other person—and, occasionally, exposes you to their irrational revenge, as in the case of Kelly Blazek.

  Moral of the story: If you have to reject someone, do it nicely.

  BE DIRECT

  In addition to his politeness, another thing that impressed me about Jordan was his directness. When I asked him if he was interested in blogging, he stated clearly that he wasn’t. He didn’t show fake interest. As a result, I respected his rejection—and him as a person as well.

  I haven’t always been a practitioner of this approach. Many times when I have had to say no to someone, I have delayed and procrastinated. Then I’d try to find the least painful way to deliver my rejection. This approach is usually counterproductive. A lot of people have the tendency to give indirect, sugarcoated rejections. They usually come in two forms: big setups and yes-buts.