Rejection Is Not A Reflection of Your True Abilities

In human psychology, rejection has created signals in our nervous system that are equivalent to pain. Naturally, we tend to avoid pain when possible because it represents imminent danger to our bodies, but the pain we experience in our minds is channeled differently. 

When we were hunters and gatherers, being part of a tribe was essential to our survival. In our social collectives, certain people were better at certain things than others. Together, their collective strengths proved formidable against any natural enemies. In most cases, to be rejected from a tribe was a death sentence since it represented a risk of losing access to food or protection. 

Therefore, it was historically in our best interest to do whatever it took to stay part of the tribe and avoid rejection.  So, in a society with more opportunities than ever before to improve the quality of our lives, why are we averse to experiences that may improve the quality of our lives? 

It all starts with how schools operate and how failure is perceived as bad, while success in good grades should be sought after. Let’s examine how schools have warped our perception of failure. 

Schools Taught Us To Fear Rejection & Failure 

In school, we were taught from the get-go to always listen to our teachers, do what they tell us, and submit assignments on time. We were evaluated on our ability to learn through tests, projects, and presentations based on selected subject material. 

In high school, we were graded using the traditional grading system: 90 to 100 is an A, 80 to 89 is a B, 70 to 79 is a C, 60 to 69 is a D, and anything below 60 is an F. 

We were taught to avoid getting anything less than an A at all costs because it would represent a lack of understanding of the subject material.  These letters are slapped on our transcripts as if they are permanent representations of our ability to learn and achieve success, when the truth is that our ability to learn changes throughout our lives. 

Let’s translate these grades to batting averages:

1. 'A': 0.900 – 1.000

2. 'B': 0.800 – 0.899

3. 'C': 0.700 – 0.799

4. 'D': 0.600 – 0.699

5. 'F': 0.000 – 0.600
   

Does this scale transfer to sports? According to MLB, Willy Adames had the highest batting average of 0.571 in the 2023 baseball season. Josh Bell and three others clocked in at exactly 0.500.

According to the traditional grading system, every major league baseball player would be a failure at hitting the ball. Nobody is even scoring in the 'D' range, which suggests one of two things: 

1. Even the most athletic humans are not meant to play baseball, or 

2. Our perception of the grading scale has skewed our ability to accept rejection and failure in real life. 

Which conclusion are you drawing?  Something has to be off.

After comparing the grading scale to major league baseball, how we view failure has likely been skewed by our childhood experiences. Therefore, it’s time to redefine what is considered a success, what is considered a failure, and how failures are learning experiences in the real world. 

Reasons You Will Get Rejected 

As we discovered in baseball, the most successful people have nowhere near a perfect batting average for success. It can be argued that the more successes we have in life, the more failures we have in conjunction with them.

In sales, it is not uncommon to have a batting average of 0.05, or a 5% success rate. However, that success rate was achieved due to the numerous failures that preceded it to land the client that needed a product or service that the salesman was selling. 

Was it all the salesman’s fault? It's highly unlikely; they were doing their part. There are always forces beyond a person's control that generate poor experiences.

Let’s examine a few of the major forces in play. 

Incomplete Information 

When it comes to making decisions, we will never have perfect information. There will always be additional considerations that we leave out, either because we don’t know about them, they’re not on our minds, or we have a skewed perception of how certain factors play into our conclusions. 

We all know that the best job candidates never get selected, but the most compliant candidates get selected. This is because job applications are not a test of skill and well, but rather, the ability to fit into the company mold. 

When you represent yourself on paper, the viewer never gets to see the real you but rather a snapshot you’ve selected. You don’t know who’s viewing that document you created, but you hope it will resonate with them.  

There could’ve been other experiences that you could not represent, and if they had known about them, they would have selected you over the candidate. However, in the real world, we only have enough time to consider the most important factors in our decision-making, which means we will always operate with incomplete information. 

You Reminded Them of Someone They Don’t Like 

This is one of the most unfortunate circumstances that is beyond our control. When you’re trying to sell yourself to somebody, you have no idea of the number of people that they’ve come across before you.

You may accidentally have a look, way of doing things, or even something else about you that reminds them of somebody who wrote them the wrong way, and they’re automatically going to conclude that you’re gonna rub them the wrong way as well. Much like what we said with incomplete information, you have no idea you’re about to be blindsided by that hidden factor and face rejection. 

Unfortunately, you can’t place everybody in the world, and trying to please everybody guarantees that you will please nobody. Therefore, if somebody rejects you because you reminded them of somebody they didn’t like, that’s on them, not you. It is almost guaranteed that you can find somebody else to sell yourself to and move on from this rejection. 

Some Minor Thing You Were Subpar At Set Them Off 

Imagine yourself giving a near-flawless presentation: your technology was working, your body language and phrasing were on point, and you had everybody leaning in and taking notes on what you had to offer. Everything goes well until somebody asks a question that completely blindsides you, and you’re unsure how to answer it. 

That small thing that you were unable to do sets them off. Either the person you said strongly believed that you should’ve been able to answer that question, or they asked something you weren’t expecting and temporarily lost your stride. As a result, they believe that they have deflated and exposed you as a hack, and ultimately, they decided to reject you. 

Deep down, you know you were legitimately selling a product or service to help the client's situation. You just had a moment, and whatever that moment did, it caused the phase with the client to go from working with you to working against you. Unfortunately, the client doesn’t know that that was strictly a one-off, and they perceive that it could be a pattern about you, so they reject you. 

When this rejection happens, we can beat ourselves up immeasurably for it. We punish ourselves over the smallest mistakes when the problem isn’t that we made a minor error, but that somebody else’s interpretation of that error was grandiose. When errors like this happen, we need to remember that a reasonable interpretation of their meaning is what we should be reflecting on, not when people go off over the smallest little things. 

The Timing Was Awful 

It’s easy to believe that the timing will work around us if we have something valuable to offer the world. Unfortunately, reality shows that this relationship is reversed.

There are times when our entries are too early or too late. 

Picture your favorite band and its lead guitar player. Imagine the lead guitar player coming in four bars too early and stepping over the vocals. Their playing is flawless, hitting every note expressively, in tune, and with a tone that reflects the moment. However, because the timing was off, the interpretation of the passage is not beautiful and expressive but mindless and distasteful. 

Unfortunately, the timing has to be right for us to have the highest probability of success in whatever we do. Suppose Steve Jobs tried to invent the Macintosh 10 years earlier. In that case, the hardware necessary to implement it might not have been available, and the project could’ve crashed dramatically differently than we have today. If the battle of Normandy had happened a day earlier or a day later, the consequences for the rest of the future would have been dramatically different as well. 

Unfortunately, we sometimes get rejected because the timing is not right. We’re trying to communicate with somebody who is busy worrying about a loved one instead of how your solution affects their project. When this rejection happens, it’s always best to reflect and ask yourself when the best time to try again would be. Often, there is going to be a second chance. 

Maybe They Had a Legitimate Reason Afterall 

This is one of the hardest pills to swallow because we want to believe that whatever we have to provide for society is good enough. We work on our craft and try to dial in every little aspect of it, but at the end of the day, it just isn’t good enough.

Sometimes, we must accept that what we have to provide is not as good as an alternative. We don’t need complete information to determine the best solution. We can use the 80:20 Principle to determine that 20% of the information will give us 80% of the knowledge to make a decision. 

This type of rejection is rarely fatal. It is simply the result of us putting our best out there only to be turned away, ignored, or brutally mocked. All the training in the world cannot change the fact that a singer is tone-deaf. 

Tactics To Fight Through Rejection 

Fighting through rejection is easier than we think, once we have enough experience dealing with it and enough tools in our toolbox to challenge the meaning behind the rejection.

The number one thing to remember when dealing with rejection is that you have options. Even if the rejection becomes glaring compared to the other options available, the heat from the moment will subside, and the other options will appear. 

Here are several general tactics to try when fighting through rejection: 

Try It A Different Way or With Something Else 

One of the best ways to overcome rejection is to try different outlets. This could involve trying to sell somebody else, auditioning for a different group, becoming part of a different friend circle, or just taking your talents and personality elsewhere where they will be appreciated and celebrated.   

Unfortunately, we need to recognize that we are not right for everybody, and so our goal should not be to try to get everybody on our side, but to find the right people who will help us be the best versions of ourselves, while celebrating our progress along the way. 

If we encounter a series of rejections and failures, we can address them using the different techniques described below. 

Keep A Victory & A Lessons Learned Log 

Keeping a log of victories and lessons learned can help us amplify the actions that are producing results while redirecting the actions that aren’t hitting the mark. This simply boils down to nothing more than positive and negative feedback, where the positive feedback ensures that what we’re doing is right, and the negative feedback helps us make better decisions next time. 

When we’re having a hard time, documenting these victories and lessons learned can help us see historical trends within ourselves. We know we can succeed through our victories and make the breakthroughs we desire. Through our lessons learned, we remind ourselves that rejection is just part of the game, but we can always take something away from it to try a different angle on the same problem next time. 

All in all, the log should not be kept to beat ourselves up over, but rather, extract the gems necessary that will help us provide the value that we seek to provide when expanding ourselves beyond our comfort zones. 

Try Again Later 

As we learned before, sometimes the timing was just off. The person you were trying to connect with was dealing with something that you had no idea about, so they couldn’t give you their full attention. 

When this occurs, it’s best to try again at a time that you and the other person think is convenient. If you cannot schedule it together, you’ll need to determine whether it can wait or you should move on.

While perfect timing is not possible in the real world, there is a clear difference between good and bad timing. To know whether it’s good or bad timing, you must read the situation objectively and compare it against your experiences to decide whether the timing is good. 

View Your Data In Terms of Absolutes Instead of Relatives 

When reviewing past experiences, we can view them in two ways: an absolute, where we were victorious or not, or how victorious we were compared to other situations. With batting averages, it’s not important to have a super high batting average, but rather, to hit X amount of Home runs to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. 

While the batting average can be important, as having a zero batting average will never lead to success, it is more important to determine the benchmark number. 

For example, instead of saying that 5% of donors must give us money for this venture to succeed, say that we need $10 million to get the next seed funding round. This way, you’re not afraid of going through as many donors as possible to achieve your goal.

You fixate on achieving the goal instead of evaluating your relative success. In these cases, it's better to get it done than perfect.

Learn To Reinterpret Your Rejection 

Building off the lessons learned, sometimes we don’t have all the information we need to make the correct interpretation of why we were rejected. Sometimes, our egos get in the way, and we miss out on the things we truly need to change in order to get a better result next time. Likewise, we may not have known that this type of experience is common amongst all people, and so being rejected is actually more sign of progress than a failure. 

When we have new knowledge on a problem, we should ask ourselves different questions that help us examine the results from a different angle. Oftentimes, we lead ourselves to false conclusions when we fail at something for the first time. However, with new data to compare our experiences against, as long as we are objective with ourselves, we have a high probability of making the right decisions for next time. 

Therefore, when we keep feeling the sting of rejection from our efforts, it might be from the fact that we’re taking the stinging head-on instead of trying to step aside from it. Reflecting on old rejections and gaining new insights is often a key to making the breakthroughs we desire. 

Read The Stories of Others 

Even in the most unique situations, it is highly unlikely that you are the first person to try something. While people may not have done exactly what you want to try, they’ve likely tried to do something similar and experienced their successes and failures. Often, people document these stories because they want to share them with people to build credibility and connect with others who are doing the same thing as they are. 

Thanks to the popularity of digital tools such as Google, ChatGPT, and Reddit, we can now find stories similar to our own to compare our experiences to what is written. Assuming everything written is honest, we can determine what to change and what to do as we continue to pursue our goals in full. 

Keep Improving Yourself & Your Craft 

One of the most important things is that we take responsibility for our craft at every step. While it is possible that what we have to offer is good enough and we have to work on the marketing or perception issues, it doesn’t hurt to continue building our skills for future ventures. 

With technology disruption becoming more commonplace than ever before, the skills that we are masters of today might become meaningless in five years. Therefore, it’s important to keep up with the latest industry trends in our craft and inject our creativity to find new ways to serve clients that give us a competitive advantage against others trying to do the same things. 

As we stated with ourselves earlier, and how our skills are sometimes not good enough, staying hungry and humble about how our skills fit in the world provides the fuel necessary to continue leveling up. When people see that we are improving and providing more offerings, they will want to go with us rather than go with somebody who thinks they will stay king of the mountain forever. 

Even If You’re Doing Great, Keep Batting Away 

One of the biggest takeaways from rejection is as follows: the more you face rejection, the better you will use it to your advantage.  Similar to riding a bike, playing guitar, or learning to throw the football, the more meaningful practice you get in, the more you’ll know how to maneuver random situations that will arise. 

Rejection is not a game of relative success but of absolute numbers.  One of the most deceptive situations we can run into is starting strong, such as a batting average of 0.7, but we only swing the bat 10 times in that time. 

As we increase from 10 to 100 swings, we go through trials and tribulations… only to hit 48 balls, which nosedives our batting average to 0.480.  If we only look at the relative metric, it can be demoralizing since it appears we're going downhill.

Likewise, if your batting average with sales, pitches, and auditions is high, but you only attempted once or twice, your results will unlikely reflect your desired success. 

It is better to fail 96 auditions and score 4 roles than to fail 19 auditions and score only 1 role.  The 1:19 is a better relative ratio, but the 4:96 reflects four opportunities successfully seized, which may lead to future opportunities not reflected in the metric.

For more perspective on rejection, I strongly recommend watching 100 Days of Rejection. Can you get a 100-day streak, too?