Finishing First in The Rejection Olympics
I have spent most of my life paralyzed by the thought of doing things outside my comfort zone. It wasn’t until my second year of university when I was a residence soph that I became comfortable with doing the uncomfortable. Doing silly dances, being the first person to put myself out there, or strike up conversation with a stranger became the norm as a soph. However, as I came to Ivey and began to discover the wonders of sales and entrepreneurship, I realized that a big part of me was not willing to take that leap of faith into rejection. Sure, I could put myself in uncomfortable situations, but facing failure and rejection was another issue. It was time to hit the gym and work on that severely underdeveloped rejection muscle of mine.
Thankfully I had the opportunity to participate in Eric Janssen’s Rejection Olympics where I put myself through rejection seven times over two weeks.
My Rejections
- Apply for a job that you don’t quality for
- Find an online course that you normally have to pay for and get it for free
- Offer a webinar to teach someone something
- Negotiate a lower phone/internet/cable bill
- Borrow money from a bank for a paper plane flight
- Call your credit card provider and ask them to lower your interest rate
- Call your bank and try to withdraw bitcoin
It turns out that Ashton Kutcher did not want to offer advice, the bank did not want to lend me money for a paper plane flight, and the creative engineering course I want to take was not going to be free. However, there were some surprises. I applied for a growth executive position at a $100 million company, in Australia and incredibly enough, they wanted to have a phone interview! But no phone call came through…
The Path of Most Resistance
People are like electricity in the way that both always look for the path of least resistance, which is generally a good, but in this case, it takes away from the purpose of this challenge.
My hardest challenge was when I offered a webinar to teach someone how to win at monopoly every time. To create maximum resistance, I went to Ivey alone with the aim to approach a student I didn’t know and offer them a webinar. My mammoth brain was on high alert because I was in a tribe of people I see frequently, and I didn’t have any friends with me to make it less uncomfortable. I paced back and forth in the halls for 30 minutes before I built up the courage to say something, and of course, get rejected.
The time leading up to the moment was excruciating but I understood that every minute I was staying in the uncomfortable zone, the better I was becoming.
Strategies
To follow through with the challenges I noticed it was easier when I was in the mindset of being open to fail. Most of my attempts were done after talking with a friend and building up the “social momentum” to get rejected.
Another strategy was to burn the bridge behind me. In the case of offering someone a webinar, I put my belongings in a study room and promised myself that I would not go back in until I completed the challenge.
However, the most effective strategy I found was to have a greater understanding of the merits of being open to rejection and the mental barriers blocking us from getting there. Humans are wired to not stand out in the crowd and face the risk of being shunned from their tribe, but this is not how to function as an exceptional person nowadays. You must be willing to stand out and have people dislike you.
Stretching my Mind
There is this idea of being velocitized. If you are driving your car at 60 km/h and enter the highway at 100 km/h and then go back into a 60 km/h zone, you’ll have the tendency to rest above 60 km/h. Doing things like the Rejection Olympics, helped velocitize me to a level above where I was originally resting at. It stretched my mind to be more willing to take that leap to start a business, more willing to talk to that girl I like, or more willing to apply for that job that is hard to get.
The more open we are to failure, the better off we are for it, because tremendous opportunities lie on the fence of rejection.
Bonus: A Model to Implement in Your Life
I talked a lot about rejections, and often times fear of rejection is often tied to regrets people have in life. I believe there is immense power in having simple models to guide your thinking, so let me tell you about a model that you can use.
Jeff Bezos has a mental model that he calls “regret minimalization”, which guides many of his actions. The idea is that you should do the thing that will give you the least regrets in the future. That means if you are debating whether to start that business you are thinking about, ask yourself, “will I regret not starting this business years from now?” If the answer is most likely yes, then pursue it. If you are debating whether to quit, ask yourself if you will regret your decision in the future, regardless of the outcome. I encourage everyone to start using this regret minimalization model.
