How do you make yourself immune to rejection?
Can you make yourself immune to rejection?
Entrepreneur, Jia Jiang, decided to conduct a personal experiment after being turned down by an investor, and nearly giving up on his dreams. See how he would handle 100 days of rejection!
To hold himself accountable, he documented his rejection experiment on a blog and filmed many of his encounters. What happened next is the stuff of modern fairy tales. One of his early videos went viral (see below) and opportunity after opportunity opened up for Jia Jiang.
Rather than exploit these opportunities, Jia Jiang realized that he had tapped into something extraordinary by his exploration of rejection, and so decided to continue his experiment.
What Jia Jiang discovered was the psychology behind rejection. That a rejection says far more about the person rejecting, and their current circumstances, and what the best ways are to change a rejection into a positive or a compromise.
Perhaps the most insightful thing to come out of Jin’s entire experiment is that it is not rejections that hold most people back, it is the fear of rejection that stops people from even trying in the first place. Jin asks some for some crazy things, and embarrassingly he rarely gets rejected, even when deliberately trying for the purposes of the project.
Rejection proof is a highly entertaining and lighthearted look at one of our deepest fears. It gives good and practical advice about how to ask for even the most outlandish things; but more interestingly it also goes into how to reject something and how reject in a way that still allows for the other party to leave feeling like that got a positive response.
Asking for something does not have to be a zero-sum game, and arguably should never be.
Jin’s experiment led to him reexamining his life and the choices he had made based on rejection and the fear of rejection. It is a fascinating story with a slew of good advice for anyone who has ever felt rejection or feared rejection to the point of inaction. It ultimately says we should embrace rejection as a valuable learning tool about other people and ourselves.
Enjoy watching Jin ask for doughnuts in the shape of the Olympic rings.
Mike Falconer 