There was a time in my life when nothing seemed to go right

I had just finished my masters and I was looking for a career change. I remember thinking at the time that this was going to be a cake walk. I have a bachelor's degree in engineering, got some experience under my belt and now a masters in business. Who wouldn’t want to hire me? 

Turns out nearly everybody

I spent months applying and got nothing. Months turned into even more months. Resumes it seemed got sucked into this black hole that propelled them into another dimension in the space-time continuum. Hey, maybe I did get a job in a parallel universe. Certainly not in this one.

That wasn’t a good time, it wasn’t a good time because I took it personally. Every rejection seemed to reach back into my past and yank a part of myself that I did not want to be reminded of. A part of myself that I had convinced myself that I had outgrown. The part of myself that I thought wasn’t good enough. You remind yourself of that enough times and it starts to become true. But what is true?

Why rejection? Why this essay? 

Rejection isn't pretty. An idea is a little piece of our being. A resume is a catalogue of our accomplishments. There is pride in that. A creative endeavour is the output of the sum total of our imagination, our vulnerability, our passions. 

To throw an idea or a creative endeavour into the market and hear crickets is painful. Sending out your resume and getting multiple 'thank you for your application..but' responses is soul destroying. But it’s also a constant.

In the realm of work it's a constant if you’re being laid off and now have to put yourself out there, it's a constant if you’re looking for a career change without the relevant experience and it's especially a constant if you’re putting bold, creative work out into the world. 

Given its such constant I haven’t really sat down to think about it in a serious manner, this is my attempt

Tyranny of the Experts…or the view from the other side

Brian Koppelman is a screenwriter in Hollywood and creator of such TV shows as Billions. In his early twenties while still in college he was a concert promoter of sorts. At the time he was working with a singer/songwriter who was creating waves in the college circuit. People would travel from New York to Boston just to hear her perform. Her name was Tracy Chapman (for you youngins out there, there was a time when Tracy Chapman was the biggest singer/songwriter in the world selling tens of millions of albums)  He talks of how people were moved to tears by Tracy’s music. In the pre-internet era and even though she didn’t have a record out, audiences knew the words to her songs. He would invite record company executives to her gigs. They too would be moved to tears. But..

Here is how Brian tells it

They (record company executives) would say, “Can I please meet her? I just want to meet her. What an amazing artist...” And I could see they weren’t bullshitting me. They had a cathartic experience watching her perform. They would look me in the eye and say, “Thank you for a night I’ll always remember.” Then they would say, “Now you know we can’t possibly sign her at [insert major record label].” 

And I would say, “Dude, I don’t understand, man. I saw you crying.” She was playing Talking About a Revolution and Baby Can I Hold You Tonight? And they’d go, “Yeah, but she’s black.She seems a bit masculine” And I’d say but didn’t you see like those 300 or 400 or 500 people who knew every word even though there’s no record out? They’d just say, “Yes, but it’s college. It’s bullshit.”

In a purely rational sense, the record execs were right..no one like Tracy Chapman had ever been successful before. She was very different to what was happening in music in the late 80s early 90s. They were right to have their defences up. Most rejections, whether romantic, professional, and even social, are due to “fit” and circumstance..success to experts is gauged by what is successful today and projecting that into the future. Gatekeepers are answerable to their higher ups. 

As Seth Godin says in a blog post the people who turn you down have a reason, but they're almost certainly not giving you the real reason. The reasons they do give are usually sugar coated or are part of a cookie-cutter set of responses that are safe. Here is how Godin makes the distinction:

Fake reasons: I don't like the colour, it's too expensive, you don't have enough references, there was a typo in your resume.

Real reasons: My boss won't let me, I don't trust you, I'm afraid of change. 

There was a famous study done where the researchers concluded that although creativity is seen as a desired goal, most institutions reject creative ideas. The study found that people hold a covert bias against creativity especially when they experience uncertainty. Uncertainty is a state, whether people admit it to themselves or not, that people feel strongly to diminish or avoid. Creative ideas are novel but also create a dissonance in people's minds. The dissonance of viewing creativity and practicality as attributes that go hand in hand. 

All of this to say that the person saying no isn’t an atomized unit. The person is connected into groups, situations, and contexts. And that requires attuning one’s perspective not only on people themselves but also on their relationships and connections to others…and their real need to minimise uncertainty. So when you face rejection, it’s not you being rejected by everyone. It’s just one slither of an audience rejecting a snapshot of your work—a resume and cover letter you submitted, an interview you gave, a piece of art you produced. With some distance, you can see it as an opportunity to learn and tell a better story to the right audience. 

Dispassionate YOU

With experts or gatekeepers it takes a bit of understanding where they are coming from and how your work relates to their context. It is valuable listening to the experts and hearing their reasons and feedback..but a skill that is worthwhile is a dispassionate evaluation of those reasons. As Brian Koppelman says in that same conversation

If you can dispassionately evaluate the reasons for rejection and find them with merit, you can address them; without merit, you can ignore them. [Rejection] is a body blow that hurts, my emotional reaction is anger and hurt. Now let me step back and, to the best of my ability, dispassionately evaluate the rejection. Is there something in that rejection that hits home in the secret place where I know the thing is flawed? If it does, is that addressable? If it doesn’t, are the fundamental things I believe about this still true? Okay, if they are, let’s press on. If they’re not, can we fix it? If we can’t, maybe that rejection is right. But dispassion is really important because you have to know it’s not a rejection of you and you have to be able to find a way to evaluate.

So the right kind of no, isn't a no. You learnt what does not work or it's a no for now. The person (or the company) was the wrong person (or company) or given their worldview they got the wrong message. They rejected your story..comeback with a new story. 

In their book on ecological systems ‘Resilience Thinking ’, writers Brian Walker and David Salt describe resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure” But It's more than just rolling with the punches, it's benefiting from them. Resilient systems are those that encounter unforeseen threats and when necessary put themselves back together again. 

This is similar to what Nassim Taleb calls antifragility i.e fragile systems are those that are damaged by shocks, robust systems weather shocks and antifragile systems benefit from shocks e.g our immune system. Don't be fragile..be antifragile

From a dispassionate point of view, rejection is a signal. It's a step in the right direction, it's either pointing to a way that you can improve and sharpen your offering or change who you are offering it to. Like the parable of the crooked tree that loggers reject because it cant produce planks..so the crooked tree is allowed to grow old and serve a host of other purposes. 

Disruptive YOU

Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen describes a disruptive innovation as one that serves the needs of a market that the incumbents usually ignore, e.g. music streaming or Netflix. But as technology improves and peoples habits change, the innovation expands and serves the needs of a blogger slice of the market..until the incumbents are displaced (ahem..Blockbuster)

As mentioned, the experts usually settle for the status quo because that is what has worked in the past…so what if you were a disruptive innovation? Find a cohort whose needs aren't being met and use your skills to solve their problems. Then as your skills and network improves you start to gain trust and that uncertainty gap starts to narrow. Start small and grow together. Like Tracy Chapman and the college kids…the ‘experts’ eventually will take notice. Find a community where you feel a sense of belonging and then help that community. Keep doing that and you build a body of work that would be hard to reject

Conclusion

There is a coda of sorts to my story. After being rejected for a number of months I stopped applying. I found a part time job, signed up to meetup.com and went to every meetup that even midly interested me. From those I gravitated towards the startup/tech and social entrepreneurship meetups. Those were the ones that left me feeling energised. I found my community. I started volunteering for startups, eventually started working for a startup, co-founded the disruptive business network and was able to stitch together a career founded on design thinking/HCD/innovation frameworks. But my relationship with rejection is ongoing and I know that it will be waiting for me around the corner. The practice I am working on (and I stress working on)  is what the stoics call amor fati i.e the mindset that you take on for making the best out of anything that happens and treating each and every moment—no matter how challenging—as something to be embraced, not avoided. To not only be okay with it, but love it and be better for it. So that like oxygen to a fire, obstacles and adversity become fuel for your potential.