Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection (17 page)

O
bviously, the rejections I sought throughout my 100 Days of Rejection did not have life and death consequences. When I asked Jackie for customized donuts or asked Robert to speak over Costco’s intercom, there was nothing on the line except my own internal battle with rejection. But I found myself wondering how it would feel to turn my efforts toward more meaningful questions. What lessons could I learn from the deepest rejections in life, when there was no upside in sight? What I found was that sometimes it’s not about getting a yes or a no. Sometimes facing rejection is about something else. It’s about being willing to endure rejection because there’s a profound reason for doing so.

During my rejection journey, I had the privilege of meeting many people on interesting journeys of their own. Massoud Adibpour was one of those people. After graduating from James Madison University in 2005, he joined a consulting firm in Washington, DC. The income was great—but Adibpour was miserable. The place lacked creativity, he told me, and while working there he felt like just a number. Eventually he quit and started traveling the world. After visiting far-flung places like Thailand and Cambodia, he returned to DC much happier and ready to simplify his life. Music had always been his passion, and soon he found his dream job as a concert promoter. But he also felt a profound urge to help make other people as happy as he was. So in 2013, he started a side project—or more like a mission, really—called Make DC Smile.

Every Monday morning, Adibpour holds big poster-size signs covered in positive messages at a busy DC street corner. He holds up the signs to passing traffic while waving and smiling. His only purpose, he says, is to “promote positivity and hopefully take people out of their negative element.” His signs—and his smile—have become part of DC’s Monday morning commuting landscape. They have also caught the attention of major news outlets, who seem fascinated by a man so determined to make others smile.

Adibpour heard about my 100 Days of Rejection project and reached out, hoping to collaborate with me in some way. I already had a trip planned to DC, so we agreed to meet up—and for me to join his campaign on my trip. In order to
turn the experience into a rejection attempt, in addition to waving Adibpour’s signs, we would ask strangers passing by to join us.

A few weeks later, on an unseasonably chilly morning, I met Adibpour at the base of the Washington Monument. A tall man sporting a beanie, he greeted me with a warm and genuine smile. After exchanging a handshake and then a bro-hug, we headed to our street corner and started waving signs at passing cars. In truth, I had no idea how Monday morning commuters would react to an Asian guy and a Middle Eastern guy holding up messages imploring them to be happy. This was DC, after all, a city known for its tough commute and even tougher people. I was ready for anything.

Adibpour had brought a stack of signs with him. We worked our way down his signage from
HONK IF YOU LOVE SOMEONE
to
TODAY IS AWESOME
to
DON’T BE SO HARD ON YOURSELF
—with mixed results. Some drivers honked in acknowledgment, waved at us, or actually smiled. The rest shot us confused looks or ignored us altogether.

After fifteen minutes of sign waving, we started asking pedestrians walking by to join us. We quickly experienced a barrage of rejections, mostly from well-dressed men and women hustling off to work (although one of them, after turning down our offer, added, “I love the signs”). A family of four, with the parents tightly holding the hands of their two young boys, hustled by without even slowing down. The parents looked determined not to acknowledge our existence, even though the kids seemed interested.

Eventually, a man who looked like a student approached us. His name was Peter. He was intrigued by what we were
doing and volunteered to join in. After sifting through the signs, he finally settled on the one that simply said:
SMILE
. And with that, our happiness team expanded 50 percent. I instantly felt stronger and more motivated. Having a third person join us felt like a movement.

For a while, it seemed as though Peter would be the only one to hop in. Our efforts to recruit more people ended in a dizzying string of rejections. “How many rejections do you think we’ve gotten?” I asked Adibpour at one point, having lost count. He half jokingly replied it was maybe three hundred. “But it is good,” he said, “because they were thinking about the signs.” To him, that in itself was enough to be counted as a yes.

Soon after, a couple with a child wandered by, looking lost. Adibpour asked if they needed help getting somewhere. After giving them directions to the aquarium, he invited them to join us. “We are protesting against unhappiness,” I added. All three of them laughed, picked up signs, and started waving them to the traffic. I’m not sure why they agreed to join, but they really got into it. We had doubled our team in size again, and it was a blast.

The Make DC Smile episode was a fun experience for sure, but once was enough for me. For Massoud Adibpour, it was a completely different story. His positive attitude and persistence were genuine and unrelenting. He never showed any disappointment or distress, even when we were getting rejected trying to recruit people to join. Wearing a seemingly permanent bright smile, he focused on showing me the right way to wave, the right signs to display, and the proper
way to invite people to join us. His happy, calm energy was infectious.

By the time I met him, he had been waving his signs week after week for more than a year, through the hot summer and cold winter, with no monetary reward whatsoever. A bright and well-educated guy, he could have used his time to do something else, like taking on a second job or starting his own business. From a pure economics standpoint, I told him, Make DC Smile made no sense at all.

“You can’t buy happiness,” he replied, matter-of-factly.

Adibpour had quit his well-paying consulting job because he saw no meaning in it. But he had found meaning in the Make DC Smile project, and that sense of purpose seemed to inoculate him against the fact that he was constantly being rejected by strangers. “Rejection is a terrible feeling, especially when the weather is cold,” he explained. “But I’ve gotten used to it. Not everyone smiles or acknowledges me. Gradually, as I made others happy, I became happier myself.”

Adibpour’s example demonstrated that happiness doesn’t always come from money, comfort, or acceptance. That’s why some of the most brilliant and influential people spend their time and effort on things that have only intrinsic reward. Mother Teresa didn’t run a hedge fund, and Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t go into real estate. Instead, they spent their lives advocating for causes that were meaningful to them, even though they lived through hardships and rejection.

The experiences I had standing on the street asking for different things—whether it was money or just attention—were some of the most difficult of my rejection journey. I felt I was constantly being judged by strangers based on the way I looked, the way I carried myself, and what I was asking for. When people lowered their heads to avoid eye contact or sped off without acknowledging my existence, it wasn’t the most pleasant feeling.

These experiences also made me wonder about the real panhandlers I have encountered. They weren’t trying to be noble or conducting social experiments. They were begging for money for themselves for reasons not known to me. In the sweltering heat or bitter cold, in clouds of exhaust and oceans of noise, through bullets of mockery and arrows of judgment, panhandling seemed like the worst job in the world.

There used to be a gigantic divide between my life and the lives of the panhandlers I used to pass every day on my own commutes through Austin. Even though we lived in the same city and breathed the same air, our worlds couldn’t be further apart. But my own experiences with facing rejection on the street gave me an empathy for panhandlers that I never thought I would have. It also gave me the desire to get to know them and understand their world.

One day, as a rejection attempt, I approached a panhandler standing on a street corner next to a traffic light at the busy highway off-ramp and asked if I could interview him. I had no idea if he would agree. Would there be a conversation, or would this be another rejection?

He looked to be in his sixties and had a bushy white beard that instantly made me think of Santa Claus. He wore sunglasses and a baseball hat that read “Veteran.” Military dog tags hung from his neck. He also had a big sign that read D
ISABLED
V
ETERAN
. There is no mistake in his message and identity.

His name was Frank. While he agreed to the interview, he also looked around uneasily, as if checking if he was in some kind of trouble.

In the next ten minutes, he told me his incredible story. Originally from Michigan, Frank fought in the Vietnam War but became injured and couldn’t work. His brain injury also caused him to have a speech impediment, which made it difficult to understand him. He had been waiting for more than eighteen months for the government to upgrade his veteran disability benefit to cover more than just basic food and shelter, but it hadn’t come yet.

Worst of all, Frank and his wife had a six-year-old son who was the size of a three-year-old due to a severe heart condition. He had an upcoming surgery scheduled at a Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi, a city 250 miles south of Austin. Frank was on the street panhandling so they could afford the trip, which would require him and his wife to stay in a
hotel for up to two weeks. While insurance would cover the surgery, Frank simply didn’t have the money to get himself there.

After we’d chatted for a while, I thanked Frank for sharing his story with me and gave him whatever cash I had. He graciously thanked me. He also made sure I knew how proud he was of his military service to his country. He asked me, “Have you ever served?” I said, “No, but I serve my wife.” Frank gave me a hearty laugh, and for a moment I could see what he might look like in happier times. His smile made him look ten years younger.

After a handshake, Frank went back to his post, and I got back in my car with a heavy heart. Frank had faced so many kinds of rejection and misfortune. And now he was standing there, a proud and desperate father who once served and sacrificed for his country, being rejected by hundreds upon hundreds of drivers passing by. If only they knew Frank’s story, they might actually stop. It might take him mere hours to get the funds he needed, not days or weeks or longer.

In a talk at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts (RSA), University of Houston social researcher Brene Brown described the difference between sympathy and empathy: “Empathy fuels connection, while sympathy drives disconnection,” she said. “Empathy is feeling with people…. When someone is in a deep hole and they shout out from the bottom and say ‘I’m stuck, it’s dark, I’m overwhelmed.’ And then we look and we say ‘Hey’ and we climb down: ‘I know what it’s like down here, and you are not alone.’ Sympathy is
[someone saying from the top] ‘Ooh! It’s bad, huh? You want a sandwich?’ ”

I have sympathy toward many causes and situations, which often seem remote and out of my control. But now I have empathy toward panhandlers asking for money to help their families. I had no way to confirm what Frank told me. But to me, it didn’t matter, because I knew how crappy it was to be on the street asking for money. In a way, I was grateful for the rejection I’d experienced when asking for money, because it gave me a chance to climb down into the deep hole Frank was in, just for a moment, to know what it was like.

Stephen Covey, the bestselling author of the book
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
, said: “When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.” And Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric and a man widely considered to be one of the best business leaders of all time, said, “If you have everything else you need in terms of talent and skill, your humanity will come to be your most appealing virtue to an organization.” Any rejection can be an opportunity for empathy if you look at it the right way. We can allow rejection to shut us down, but we can also allow it to open us up, to compel us to understand and help others.

100 DAYS OF REJECTION: INTERVIEW A FEMALE BODYBUILDER

Like I mentioned earlier, throughout my 100 Days I received a lot of requests from people, and some of those requests were pretty off the wall. One of the strangest I received was from John, a forty-nine-year-old casino dealer from California. More than anything, John wanted me to interview a female bodybuilder.

The request itself was unusual to say the least—but so was John’s persistence. When he first sent me the request, I dismissed the idea as bizarre and as something that didn’t fit my personality or my interests. I also didn’t find his request that challenging. Why would I be afraid to ask a bodybuilder for an interview? And an interview for what? I wasn’t even sure if he was serious or joking. So I ignored it. Then he sent me the request again—and again, and again. He even sent me videos of female bodybuilders performing in contests, trying to convince me of their beauty. By the twentieth time, I started to get curious—not about his request or female bodybuilding, but about his tenacity and reasoning. So I wrote back and asked him why he wanted me to do this so badly.

It turned out that John had always been fascinated by female bodybuilders. He wanted to find out why they enter a field dominated by men, and how they value beauty. He had tried to approach a couple of bodybuilders himself and was blown off, so he developed this crippling fear of rejection from the very people he most admired. It was to a point that he just had to ask me to fulfill the wish for him.

His story made his request make more sense, but I still didn’t know how to fit this interview into my rejection journey, so I politely said no.

But John didn’t give up. He kept going and going. Each time I posted a new video, he would follow up with encouragement in the comment area, but also beg me to interview a female bodybuilder, explaining how much it would mean to him.

I said earlier that every rejection has a number. For John, that number was forty-four. After his forty-fourth ask, I finally gave in and said yes. After all, it’s hard to say no to something this important to a loyal fan.

Through LinkedIn, I sent out messages to three female bodybuilders in the Austin area, requesting a sit-down interview. One of them said yes. Her name was Melanie Daly. She was an Austinite who owned a small but successful personal coaching gym and had won multiple gold medals in national natural bodybuilding contests.

In the interview, Melanie answered all John’s questions, some of which were rather personal. She talked about why she became a bodybuilder and what drove her to be excellent in her profession.

Melanie also revealed an unexpected fact about her profession. Bodybuilders as a group have to confront their own rejection fear on a constant basis. They are afraid of both their own rejection and that from others. Because they put enormous amounts of work and time into their own bodies, she said, they tend to be haunted by imperfections and are very insecure about themselves. They often reject themselves.

Moreover, female bodybuilders often feel rejected by society. When people think about feminine beauty, the images
that pop up usually don’t involve large muscles and pumping iron. Because Melanie and her fellow bodybuilders view beauty and health differently from the rest of the society, they face judgment and rejection—especially in the dating world—every day.

In that respect, John had more in common with the people he so admired than he even realized.

John’s persistence had got me wondering: What would I be willing to go through forty rejections for? Or four hundred rejections? Or four thousand rejections? Maybe for a good deal on a car, or for a successful business or career. Definitely for a great marriage and for the well-being of my loved ones. The higher the number went, the more valuable the things I was willing to be rejected for became. When it came to love, friendship, and health, though, I realized that the number approached infinity.

When you don’t know how much you want and value something, rejection can become almost a measuring stick. Some of the most successful people obtained their achievements
only
after going through the most gut-wrenching rejection. Because it was through that rejection that they discovered how much pain they were willing to experience in order to obtain their goal.

Comedian Louis C.K. decided he wanted to become a comedy writer and stand-up performer as a kid growing up in Boston. Possessing a rare combination of brazenness and
heart, disrespectfulness and relatability, crudeness and insight, Louis C.K. blossomed into his life dream. By his mid-forties, he had accomplished more than most comedians could ever hope for.

As a stand-up performer, he frequently performed on the most popular late-night TV shows, and his tours usually sold out within hours. His one-hour specials were made into DVDs that yielded millions in profit, and he even had his own show on HBO. He’s been nominated for thirty Emmy Awards, winning five.

Given his innate talent and the fact that he had managed to achieve his dream career, you might think Louis C.K.’s success was the natural outcome of all the right lucky breaks. Yet that couldn’t be further from reality. In fact, he was rejected over and over again in the pursuit of his dream. And it was
because
of all those rejections that he found out how badly he wanted a career in comedy.

When he was seventeen, Louis C.K. gave his first stand-up performance during an open mic night at a Boston night club where aspiring comedians would get onstage to tell jokes. The audiences at these events are notoriously tough on people, often booing them off the stage. It’s a nerve-racking way for people with stand-up dreams to test their talent, and an equally convenient way for them to give up their dreams after public rejection.

Not knowing anything about the setting nor having ever even attempted stand-up, Louis C.K. spent days preparing two hours’ worth of material that he thought was great. But the audience thought differently.

After only about a minute and a half, “the people just
stared at me,” he recalled in an interview about his career on the
Howard Stern Show
. After delivering a joke that clearly bombed horribly, he’d said, “I think that’s all I really have,” and walked off the stage, humiliated. The emcee proceeded to make fun of him for ten minutes afterward. “It was a terrible feeling, and I wanted to die,” Louis C.K. said.

But he gathered up the courage to try again. A famous local comic put him in front of a bigger crowd without any preparation. “It was awful,” Louis C.K. recalled. “Literally my hands were shaking, and my heart was pounding so that my head kept bobbling up and down.” Needless to say, this time it went even worse and he bombed again.

These thrown-to-the-wolves experiences would have led many young dreamers to believe they didn’t have the talent or that the career they dreamed of wasn’t as glamorous as they had imagined. In the popular “fail fast” culture that many entrepreneurs and businesses now are clinging to, most, if not all, would have concluded that doing stand-up comedy might not be their thing. Most of them would have moved on to try something else, perhaps something that didn’t involve such public exposure.

When asked why didn’t he walk away at that point, Louis C.K. explained: “A little time went by and I was like, well, I didn’t die, and I am still interested. That felt bad when it was going on, and I’m healed now, and I’m still interested in trying again. I made it through the bad feeling. I can handle feeling that bad.”

He toiled away in Boston night club obscurity for eight years, struggling to make ends meet. Many nights he was required
to perform to literally empty rooms at clubs, because in case someone walked in, there would be a show.

One night, Jim Downey, the director of
Saturday Night Live
—which has always been a life-changing and dream platform for comedians—came to town looking for fresh writer talent. He selected every single comic who auditioned—
except
Louis C.K. It was like the world was giving him the clearest possible message to quit. But Louis C.K. still didn’t give up. The rejections, in fact, were a real gut check. He’d been rejected in a pretty dramatic way, but he still didn’t want to give up. This realization gave him the strength to pursue comedy despite these early experiences. Later, his “lucky” break finally came when he was discovered by Conan O’Brien and got a job as a writer. The rest is history. But when you think about the trajectory of his journey, Louis C.K.’s “lucky break” wasn’t really luck at all. It was the result of being able to endure multiple devastating rejections over a long period of time.

Most of us grew up harboring big dreams, whether it was becoming the president of the United States or being a rocket scientist or doing stand-up comedy for a living. Yet most of us abandon these early dreams. As we get older, we learn through self-reflection that we don’t really have the combination of passion, drive, or talent for that particular dream. Or we learn through rejection that the world isn’t receptive to our endeavors. So we change course, often finding success in other professions. Again, this is the “Upside of Quitting” that economist authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt talk about.

But some people don’t give up—even after the world initially, or even repeatedly, rejects them. They become who they always wanted to become because, through the worst rejections, they learned how much their dreams mean to them.

Dostoevsky once said, “The only thing I dread [is] not to be worthy of my sufferings.” The same goes for rejection. Is your dream bigger than your rejections? If it is, maybe it’s time to keep going, instead of giving up.