The Upside of Professional Rejection
My relationship with rejection, professionally speaking, is complicated. I’m a writer, and although I’ve been hearing “thanks, but no thanks” in response to pitches since the ’90s, that hasn’t made the no’s easy; I still smart when I think of story ideas that editors swatted away years ago.
It’s normal to hear “no” and jump to the conclusion that something is fundamentally wrong—with one’s work or, worse, with oneself. As I’ve aged, however, I’ve found that the disappointment that comes after being rebuffed doesn’t last as long as it used to. In one recent instance, after a longtime collaborator rejected a project I was passionate about, the feeling of dejection never even arrived. Instead, the “no” energized me to find someone else who believed in the idea.
Since then, I’ve grown curious about why I responded the way I did—and about whether, in this new year, I might be able to reframe how I see rejection entirely: not as a final answer, but as a provocation or an opportunity.
[Read: A toast to all the rejects]
How people process rejection is tied to culture. I grew up in the United States, which has long espoused an ethos of individualism and grit, so I’ve been surrounded by messages about the “power of positive thinking” and exhortations that people should push through dispiriting dismissals—or, as Ronald Reagan put it, “try and try again.” That attitude, if you can summon it, can be invigorating. But it doesn’t come naturally to everyone. And some people, no matter how hard they try, are rejected not because of their shortcomings but because of influences—political, societal—that they may have little power to overcome. Alison Kinney, the author of the forthcoming book United States of Rejection: A Story of Love, Hate, and Hope, told me that she worries about the notion that failing to overcome obstacles is proof of a lack of willpower, given how much is out of a person’s control. When people are rejected and blame themselves, they risk experiencing their situation as a sort of double failure.
People with certain personalities seem better suited to processing setbacks than others. Daniel Pink, the author of the 2009 book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, told me that, in his experience, the people who handle rejection best are typically confident in their ability to succeed, high in autonomy, and sure of who they are. For these people, rejection can even be a marker of distinction, Pink said. Their attitude might be: “You rejected me because you don’t understand that I’m unique.”
A 2012 study on the way rejection affects creativity echoed that finding. In a series of experiments, the authors repeatedly found that being rejected could spur people to be more creative, but only if those people had an “independent self-concept”—that is, if they were the type of people who prefer to remain “distinctly separate” from others, and to “emphasize personal goals over group goals.” The authors theorized that because such people don’t feel a strong need to belong, failure might not sting so much, and the opportunity to distinguish themselves might be extra appealing. This resonated with me: I’ve never cared much about being part of an “in-group,” and I’ve found that when I ignore external markers of success, I’m more likely to measure myself against myself and focus on my goals, not others’ expectations.
The context in which a professional rejection plays out can also help determine how someone responds. It matters, for example, what a person’s relationship is to the project they’re working on, Ayelet Fishbach, a behavioral-science professor at the University of Chicago, told me. If the endeavor feels central to their identity and they are deeply committed to it, they’re probably more likely to keep going regardless of other people’s opinions. That may be why I was so motivated after my recent rejection; the project was a memoir I’d been dreaming of writing for years.
The identity of the person who does the rejecting might also shape the outcome, Samir Nurmohamed, an associate professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. He described a study he ran, in which participants were asked to complete a simple online task and were informed, beforehand, both how well an observer expected them to perform and how likely that observer was to be correct in their prediction. Nurmohamed found that when the participants were told that the observer wasn’t credible, hearing that they had low expectations actually boosted performance, perhaps because the participant wanted to work hard to prove the observer wrong. When the participants learned that the observer’s opinion was respected, though, their performance was more likely to falter; the participants were still generally motivated to prove their naysayers wrong, but their anxiety tended to make them less successful.
The people most likely to push through rejection tend to share a specific quality: They “are willing to embrace discomfort,” Fishbach said. These people, she explained, have the ability to reframe that sense of discomfort as growth—as “a sign that I’m pushing myself, that I am doing something new, that I’m developing as a person.” After all, at its core, rejection is just feedback, Pink told me. It can provide an opportunity to approach a situation differently or at least to learn something.
[Read: The fine art of failure]
Nurmohamed said that for those trying to overcome self-doubt, a helpful tactic is to recall moments in the past when they’ve succeeded despite others’ doubts. In 2021, he co-authored a paper in which several groups of job seekers at reemployment centers in Philadelphia were asked to come up with various types of stories about themselves. The researchers found that those who were asked to tell “underdog narratives”—accounts of times when they believed in themselves and others didn’t—were more likely to find employment than those who’d been asked to tell any other type of story. They speculated that this was because the “underdog narratives” reminded the job seekers that they could succeed even when obstacles were in the way, and because the stories highlighted how much control a person has over their life.
This doesn’t mean that people should always push through in the face of negative professional feedback. As Pink reminded me, sometimes a rejection is worth taking seriously. Though a person who soldiers on through difficulty may seem stubborn, or at least admirably persistent, they’re not necessarily smart. “I want to cheer for those people from the sidelines, but sometimes they’re wrong,” he said. “They could just be escalating their commitment to a failing course of action, digging the hole even deeper.” Ryan Holiday, the author of The Obstacle Is the Way, told me he also worries about those who use others’ skepticism as a primary motivation to succeed. In that way lies madness, or at least chronic acrimony. He pointed to Michael Jordan’s 2009 Basketball Hall of Fame speech, in which Jordan made a series of ungenerous remarks about people he felt had slighted him over the years. “Here you have the most successful athlete of all time, and he’s using the crowning moment of his career to prove that he’s still haunted by these grievances,” Holiday said. It was “tragic.”
It’s also understandable. Being rejected hurts, and finding success may not erase the emotional residue of all those prior rebuffs. But a conversation with Jessica Bacal, a writer and educator, reframed for me how one might work through the soreness. Five years ago, Bacal told me, she received a particularly painful professional rejection, and she decided to process her feelings through writing. Eventually, she came up with an idea for a book: The Rejection That Changed My Life, which featured interviews with dozens of women about their professional rejections and was published in 2021. She told me she now sees that first rejection as a “gift.”
I know what she means. The worst no’s can be confidence-shattering. But for people ready to respond not with hardheadedness but with strength and grace, they also offer a rare chance: to pick up the pieces of a broken ego and rebuild.
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