Actors have a saying: You don’t get 100% of the parts you don’t audition for. If you’re an artistic type, or a writerly type, or even just someone who’s looking for a job, you may have found rejections to be so painful that you’ve just stopped applying for things. Social media and streaming TV is so soothing—why would you put yourself out there for stuff you’re not going to get anyway?
But what if you set rejection as a goal? That’s what writer Kiki Schirr did at the beginning of this year: She resolved to get 100 rejections by the end of 2018—to apply for anything and everything that interested her, even things that she thought were beyond her grasp, and to treat each rejection as evidence that she was pursuing her goal.
The first rejection rolled in on January 12th.
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But by the end of May, she’d tweeted that she might have a hard time reaching her goal—because so many of the anticipated rejections were actually acceptances.
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Now of course this a nice story because she’d having some unexpected successes. (I’m picturing some poor schmo starting the #100in2018 hashtag and on March 1st being like “...and that’s 99, and that’s 100. Done.”) Sometimes people have imposter syndrome because they’re, you know, actual imposters.
Maybe treating rejection as a pure numbers game can inoculate you against the agony of many tiny defeats.
But if you’re suffering from undeserved low self-esteem, Kiki’s success story might knock some confidence into you—sure, you might get 100 rejections, but maybe, just from sheer luck, you’ll get 10 acceptances along the way.
Even though I don’t know Kiki—maybe she’s super-skilled in all areas and failure was never a serious option—she’s definitely made me re-think my whole approach to rejection. Is it possible to take the sting out of it, the sense that each “no” is a referendum on your worth? Maybe treating rejection as a pure numbers game can inoculate you against the agony of many tiny defeats.
So set a goal—for this month, or the summer, or the year, to get told “no” more. Once a few rejections roll in, they will stop being such a big deal. And then you can use that emotional energy for other, better things, like writing or auditioning or polishing your resume. Or even setting bigger and better failure goals that, if you’re lucky, you just might fail to meet.