Rejection is a part of any successful life. If you want to take your path in a new direction, there will be people that say, “no!” You cannot avoid it. More importantly, you cannot let wanting to prevent it stop you from reaping the benefits of a fuller time on this Earth. Your mind will sabotage your future if you let it. Don’t. Put yourself out there, and eventually good things will come.
So what do you do? How do you get over it? Below I’m going to share two quick tricks I use to help me cope with the never-ending rejections that populate my Gmail Inbox.
Manage your expectations, and take the first step!
Statistics say that you’re probably going to fail in whatever you attempt the first time. Sounds cynical, doesn’t it? Well, that’s just how it is. As Tyler Durden said, “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.” When I first started sending my stories to publishers, I thought that I was a genius. I felt that I would be the next J.K. Rowling by 2030 and that my stories would get accepted in the first five to six submissions easily. I was wrong. Life served me a slice of humble pie, and the rejections came in like hotcakes.
That’s not to say that I wasn’t prepared for rejection. Many of my professors informed me that getting published was a numbers game and that the letters of rejection would be numerous. Deep down, that scared me, and it wasn’t until my second year of graduate school that I started sending my work out. I remember it took me two hours to click the “submit” button on my first application—the rejection came-in later that day.
But something strange happened. After I got that rejection email, I became numb (like the Linkin Park song). I stopped caring whether publishers liked my story or not and made a point of sending as many submissions out as possible. Most of them came back as rejections, but, eventually, one was an acceptance! And that was all I needed to get excited, and keep moving forward.
Collect your letters of rejection
Sounds crazy, I know, but keeping your letters of rejection in a folder of some sort is oddly satisfying. The more you get rejected, the less you care and realize that the sting you feel after reading that somebody didn’t like your work is entirely self-inflicted. I will often open the rejections folder I created in my email every few months and scroll down to the bottom. Each time I do it, it takes a little longer to scroll, and the longer it takes, the more satisfied I feel.
Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment (you have to be as an aspiring writer), but there’s something very empowering about turning something that I feared into something that brings satisfaction. It’s little victories like that that will mean the difference in you making it or giving up.
Michael Stanek’s Portfolio 