getting rejected is a game (and i’m winning)
It’s Saturday morning and I’m posted up on my kitchen table with my coffee and notebook. I tell myself I am not allowed to leave my post until I have applied to at least 10 jobs.
I have been unemployed for three months.
This is not the first time I have been on the hunt, but it feels like the direst. My bank account mocks me, continuing to shrink as I desperately send my resume to anyone who might possibly care. It reminds me of when I performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this time last year. Every day I would hand out little flyers with my face on them and try to lure strangers into my venue to watch my show.
I am not new to rejection. I’m a comedian, it is practically my full-time job to be let down.
But I’ve gotten better at it over the past few years. I mean really good. I don’t see rejection and “no’s” like I used to. To me, it is a game. And I am winning.
This strange game began about five years ago when I started writing my first book. I was teaching full-time and feeling the weight of being an educator for the first time. The exhaustion of the classroom was burning me at all angles. But whenever I wasn’t teaching or grading, I was plotting my escape as an artist.
On weekends my best friend and fellow teacher Kristen and I would sit at our favorite coffee shop and write. Together we started looking for agents and publishers for our books. Kristen was organized so she taught me how to put everything on a spreadsheet. Hers was already miles long.
“It’s a game, you see?” She said, pointing to how many people on her spreadsheet had already rejected her manuscript. I didn’t quite understand.
“Whenever I get rejected, you’re going to owe me a dollar!”
“What?” I said, even more confused.
“And every time you get rejected I will owe you a dollar,” she went on. “Then when one of us gets published, the other will take them out to dinner with all the money.”
It finally clicked. Getting rejected was a game. And so far I owed her a five-star steak dinner.
As I got more serious about my book I pitched more and more agents, always getting polite “no’s.” And every time I alerted Kristen she’d tally up one dollar that she owed me. Suddenly I felt rich! If I got enough of these rejections I could really get a fancy dinner with all that cash.
But deep down, it was more than that.
She taught me to celebrate my rejections. Because every rejection ultimately brought me closer and closer to winning.
In times like these, you have to see rejection this way. It’s the only way to keep from losing ourselves to the daily pain that life presents us.
I apply this perspective to my job hunt as well, because I know that every “no” brings me that much closer to getting a “yes.” And really, you only need one “yes” to springboard you into something amazing.
