Getting used to bad stuff happening to you
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I said NOW.
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Vimal confessed to me that he was nervous about putting himself out there with his newsletter. It was strange, he said, because he’d been writing blog posts for well over a decade, co-authored several books, and taught classes. Somehow though, the idea of committing to a weekly newsletter with his name on it was scary.
Naturally, I asked him why.
“Because I’m putting my name on it. This is me,” he said.
Ah, I get it.
It is absolutely terrifying to put yourself out there on your own. To be creative and risk someone sh**ting all over your hard work because they didn’t like it (or even worse, if it wasn’t good).
My experience with rejection
Sam Zell once said, “Indifference to rejection is a fundamental part of being an entrepreneur.”
In other words, part of being a successful entrepreneur is getting used to people not liking your work.
To be fair, indifference to rejection is hard.
One time, when I lived the Power Point life, I spent all weekend crafting new strategy slides. I’d never done this type of work before, and I was excited to breathe life into my ideas.
Finally, Monday morning came, and I was ready to present my work.
I remember anxiously sitting in the conference room. My deck was on the projector, my heart was racing, and I felt like I had some strange pounding in my ears that I couldn’t identify. 10 minutes late, my boss finally shows up.
He walks in and says, “What do you got?”
I proceeded to walk him through my carefully and thoughtfully prepared deck.
Before I even made it to the third slide, he said, “This is total shit.”
I’ll never forget the way my heart felt like it dropped out of my chest and slammed into the floor like the anvil in Looney Tunes.
Except it wasn’t funny. No one was laughing.
My face was most certainly red, and I fought back tears best that I could.
My boss walked out of the room, mumbling about how he shouldn’t have wasted time on me.
Now, it’s easy to focus on the tragic part of this story: how rude and inconsiderate my boss was. About 15 minutes later (after a good cry on a toilet in the women’s bathroom), I took a hard look at my deck. I started googling comparable decks, something that I admittedly should have done that weekend before presenting my pitch.
While my deck wasn’t “total shit,” it certainly could use improvement. The design wasn’t clear, and my language could have been more concise and direct.
In fact, the older and more experienced I’ve become, the more I value criticism.
Achieving indifference to rejection
Sure, the initial shock of a critique *may* still hurt my ego. But over time, it hurts less and less. Instead, I focus on the WHY, the WHAT, and my VALUES.
Why did that individual dislike my work?
What could I have done differently to avoid that criticism?
Do I value their viewpoint, i.e. do I believe that their views are consistent with the views of my target audience?
Truth be told, most people don’t critique. Check out The Mom Test if you don’t believe me. Rob Fitzpatrick shares that when entrepreneurs ask their friends, colleagues, and strangers about an idea or their product, they likely won’t receive honest answers.
From childhood, we are trained to be nice. Being nice sometimes – or often, for some of us – means keeping our opinions to ourselves.
That’s why these days, I value criticism more than compliments. When I meet someone who gives me their honest, unabashed opinion that disagrees with mine in a valuable way, I latch onto them immediately.
Indifference to rejection is a skill that anyone can learn. It simply takes practice and repetition.
Put yourself out there over and over again.
The only way through is through
Vimal and I put ourselves on the line everyday by being entrepreneurs. Even more so, we put ourselves out there by becoming thought leaders. It’s terrifying for me, and as he confessed, he’s scared to.
However, like the childhood story about going on a bear hunt, the only way through is through.
As long as you practice self-improvement and self-care, you will gain more than you could ever dream of by sharing your creativity with the world.
And maybe someday, we will all be indifferent to rejection.
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