Rejection Therapy
When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important — Ellen Degeneres
Opportunities are like buses. There’s always another one coming -Richard Branson
Fighting gravity is the hardest thing you can do.
As I experimented and stretched my creativity, sharing what I made online, early on I got nothing but hate. It comes with the territory whenever you try something new.
To a system, any change is a threat. The system-and each of us is part of the system will protect itself. Genuinely new ideas encounter resistance proportional to the size of the change they represent.
Schopenhauer’s three stages of truth. First, it’s ridiculed. Second, it’s violently opposed. Third, it’s accepted as self-evident.
Great opportunities never have “great opportunity” in the subject line. Don’t be so quick to shoot yourself down. Overcoming resistance is part of the creative process. The only thing we can ever know about the unknown is that it’s where all the amazing opportunities await.
ACTION over INTELLECT
Many business and creative failures share a similar story: mistakes or gambles made out of ignorance, enthusiasm, or naivete in the early stages lead to a project’s demise.
Most great ideas are never realized because we talk ourselves out of them before we even give them a chance. Give more things a whirl, especially, early on. The process of doing something, anything, over doing nothing at all is the path to growth and opportunity.
Adversity is intrinsic to creative work. You will never be able to avoid it completely. The more you try to avoid problems and optimize your process before you do the work, the more distant your goal will become, until it seems almost unbelievable that you’d ever actually start. Instead of walking away, try leaning in by taking action. Failure may or may not be in your future, but all the growth, opportunity, and reward will be found on the path, not around it.
Beginnings are tenuous times. Getting anything substantial off the ground means making countless tiny decisions first, any one of which might assume vast importance — if you are successful down the road.
When you are inexperienced, you have little basis on which to decide which initial decisions are critical and which can be tweaked later on if things work out. This is the point in any project when you have to remind yourself of two things. First, the risk is inevitable in creative work, and no amount of preparation can completely protect you. Second, there is a sane middle ground between leaping off a cliff and hoping there’s a net at the bottom and planning the leap for three months before becoming distracted and wandering over to some other chasm. Perfect is the enemy of good. Do enough research, ask enough questions, but remember to take that ACTION-taking a risk-is the beating heart of creative work.
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If you are ever on the fence, unsure of whether you should keep researching or take a leap, that’s a clear sign that you have already noodles too much. Get moving, learn something, and take the lessons with you regardless of the outcome.
To strip failure of its real emotional consequence is to scrub the concepts of grit and resilience of the very qualities that make them both so important: toughness, doggedness, and perseverance. -Brene Brown
Like death and taxes, failure is unavoidable.
Rejection is unavoidable. Instead of trying and failing to avoid it, lean in. Rack up as many rejections as you can. Instead of laboring over perfecting a single email to a single potential collaborator, send out a hundred and start counting rejections and ignored outreach.
Jia Jiang -Rejection Proof: How I beat Fear and became invincible. [Recommended reading]
Rejection is a lot less painful than we always fear. Fear of rejection is what keeps you paralyzed. Success softens the pain of any rejection.
Think small goals, small risks. That way, you cannot lose.
Develop your Failure muscle.
Every creative failure contains the seeds of a future victory if you're willing to dig for them.
Identifying as a creator means choosing to realize your creative aspirations. This requires sitting with the fear, coming to terms with self-doubt. You’re going to wonder whether you’ve got what it takes, whether you can make the next project work. That’s inevitable. The easiest thing in the world to do with that doubt is to choose an extreme: blind faith that everything will work out or relentless doubt that it won’t-other people can turn their ideas into a reality, but I have no agency over my own life.
Toughen those emotional calluses. Everyone feels like an impostor sometimes. No one has complete confidence in herself and her abilities. If she did, she’d quickly grow bored with hed work. High performers always manage to operate at the edge of their capabilities, whether they consciously intend or not.
Multiple factors create success in any creative pursuit. Good work is the cost of entry, but breaking through depends on everything from people skills and positioning serendipity and promotion.
You are never going to be that other person who makes it look effortless without starting, finding joy, playing, struggling, pushing through the struggle, and doing it all over again. You’ve got to practice and stand in the not-knowing and play through the parts where you suck. Embrace the suck. Have fun on your journey. If you laugh at your mistakes first, whoever laughs at you will be late to the party.
We are not voices in our heads. Stop listening to the ones and get back to work. Know thyself.
Notes taken from Chase Jarvis book Creative Calling, Chapter 9.
