If you’re doing something creative, something important or something new, you’re certain to be rejected along the way.
It’s a signal. It might be proof that you offered it to the wrong person, or that the right person saw something about your work that didn’t serve their needs. Without learning from this signal, we’re doomed to experience it again and again.
What do we know for sure?
It was rejected.
What else?
Nothing. The reasons listed in the rejection letter are almost certainly made up. Perhaps they’re insulating themselves from being re-sold (“you said you didn’t like the color, but we have other colors!”) or perhaps they’re protecting your feelings. It could be that they aren’t telling themselves the truth, or don’t want to be hassled for telling you the truth.
Few people explain their rejection with, “I’m afraid,” or “I wanted to do it but my boss won’t let me,” or “you have bad breath and I don’t like you.”
Being rejected hurts, and we’re likely to marinate in the pain. We imagine that the person who rejected us understands everything about what we offered, is a rational actor and cares as much as we do. While we’re at it, we personalize, amplify and multiply the rejection.
But all we really know is that this person, on this day, in this situation, hearing the story the way we told it, said no.
Years ago, I self-published a booklet for political activists. My timing was good, and I had a chance to sell the books from an organizer’s booth at a march on the very topic my book was about. It was a beautiful April day, and I stood on the side of route as the march went by. More than 400,000 passed my table, and I sold four books.
That’s 399,996 rejections. Maybe more.
Was it the price? Halfway through the march, I lowered it from $10 to $1, just to have a good story to blog a few decades later.
Sales did not increase. Perhaps it was the color of the jacket, the page count or the typo on page 32? None of those things.
What did I learn? That people at a march are at the march to march, not to shop.
Watch what people do, not what they say. And if you really want to learn something, change the situation and see what happens the next time.
Learning from rejection begins with understanding the lesson that’s being offered.
The uncanny valley is the place where an image that’s almost human creeps us out:
Sorry to share that.
Human beings evolved to have a distaste for things that are almost, but not quite, the usual thing. It takes a while for someone who wasn’t raised with cilantro to like it–the same with hot sauce. When Edison first showed people his moving pictures, people screamed. Our brain is warning us that categories are getting surprising and we should be on alert.
As AI spreads through the culture, we’re seeing plenty of mediocre AI-style writing. And then humans subconsciously start writing in that style because they see it so often. And finally, a grudging acceptance that it sounds okay. We’ve been through this a hundred times before.
No one asks to get creeped out. It’s usually done to us, not for us. But, over time, the creep fades.
Like most warnings, we ought to keep two things in mind:
All warnings are not the same. We need to decide which ones to ignore.
Just because a warning fades doesn’t mean that the problem is gone.
The creepiness fades.
But at the same time, there’s a creeping change as trusted and expected elements of our culture fade away.
When an organization is struggling, it’s tempting for the boss to blame the team.
I’m not sure the evidence supports this. After all, other similar organizations are thriving–drawing from precisely the same labor pool.
Sure, it’s easier to be a coach if Michael Jordan is on your team, but it turns out that creating the conditions for commitment, learning and resilience are the boss’s job, not the people you hired to follow along.
Design of any kind requires empathy. If you’re making it for yourself, it’s a hobby. Everything else is for someone else.
Great designers know who it’s for. And the design is for them, not for the designer.
Annie Jean-Baptiste teaches us about restrictive design. This is what happens when the designer fails to identify and recognize who the work is for, and then leaves people out. “Exclusion is a business decision, even when you did not mean to make it.”
Not everything needs to be designed for everyone. But all well-designed experiences and products are designed for someone.
Name your people, invite them in and give them what they need.
Putting effort into how much ambiguity we can handle can define a career and give us a path forward in our social and cultural interactions as well.
Our desire for clarity is based on safety and how we think about risk. If you know exactly what to expect, you won’t be held responsible for things that feel like they’re out of your control.
Clarity pushes us to put things in a category, a predictable box, well-labeled.
Ambiguity, on the other hand, is the nature of the future. All interactions with other people, with complex systems and with what hasn’t happened yet are somewhat unpredictable.
That range of outcomes is where possibility lies.
“I’m not sure.”
“This might not work.”
“We’ll be okay.”
Pretending that the ambiguous is certain is a short-term sort of bravado that works in the movies and politics but not in real life.
For the rest of us, there’s the chance to embrace the soft edges of ‘perhaps’ on our way to make things better.
Invest time and money and put on a show. Start a cable network, a book publishing company or become a concert promoter. You’re the gatekeeper, an adjudicator of status, a person who can transform people’s lives simply by amplifying and spreading ideas and allowing art to reach its audience.
Time and money were apparently the gating factors. It takes a while to turn a profit, and it’s uncertain and hard work.
Except…
New platforms and tools remove both time and money as barriers.
Penn and Teller needed their fame and the CW network to launch their cable show Fool Us. But now, anyone can start a competitor on YouTube in a weekend.
A radio pundit needed to spend years to build a syndicated network of terrestrial stations, but now you can start a podcast, in your basement, for free. In a weekend.
Gallerists don’t need galleries, and you don’t even need a building to coordinate a foster-home-based pet shelter.
So what’s the impediment?
I’m guessing that if you got the call today, you could put together your ideas for a book, or five minutes of standup or even the software you’d code.
But we don’t need the specific call. We’ve all been called.
The barrier is simple: fear. The fear of beginning and of sticking with it. The fear of succeeding (or failing). The fear of impostor syndrome. And the fear of going forward without a guarantee.
So let’s call it that. Fear is real, but fear might not be rational.
A long time ago, football coaches realized that watching previous games was a good way to help players learn to do better.
Alas, the only thing we do with “this call may be recorded…” is use it as a cudgel for unempowered shift workers.
If we actually want to improve our interactions, perhaps we should watch the tapes together, after the fact, to see how our habits and systems are holding us back. It works for salespeople, programmers and doctors too.
For an upcoming blog post, I’m collecting a list of small businesses that are worth bypassing Amazon for. Holiday shopping is around the corner, and sometimes people want to put in the effort to buy something that takes more than a click.
Folks like Burlap and Barrel, Gramercy Tools or Askinosie Chocolate–direct trade small businesses.
Applications are now closed, I’m busy editing. THANKS.
In his farewell address, he said, “Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course.”
It’s easy to fall in love with the idea that we live in a detached and distant situation. To imagine that culture and society and events out there have no impact on the lives we live.
The coal plant across the country, the goings on in the CEO’s office, the impact of tech on our culture… none of them are very far away. We have more leverage and connection than we want to admit.
Insulation is scarce. Technology, the competition and the shifts in media come for us, whether we seek them out or not.
It doesn’t pay to fret about things we can’t influence, but we might be able to influence more than we realize.
Perhaps isolation was useful for George. It’s clearly not true now.
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