Set a “failure Goal” and It Can Simply Lead to Success
The actors have a saying: you don’t get 100% of the roles you haven’t auditioned for. If you are an artist or a writer, or even just a person looking for a job, you may have found the rejections so painful that you just stopped applying. Social media and streaming TV are so reassuring – why would you flaunt yourself for something you won’t get anyway?
But what if your goal is rejection? This is exactly what writer Kiki Schirr did earlier this year: she decided to get 100 rejections by the end of 2018 – to apply for everything and everything that interested her, even what she thought was out of her reach, and to process each refusal as proof that she was pursuing her goal.
The first refusal was received on January 12th.
But by the end of May, she tweeted that it might be difficult for her to reach her goal, because many of the expected rejections were actually her acceptance.
Of course, this is a good story because it has had unexpected successes. (I imagine some poor guy starting the hashtag # 100in2018 and on March 1 he says, “… and this is 99, and this is 100. Done.”) Sometimes people have impostor syndrome because, you know, they are real impostors … …
But if you’re suffering from undeservedly low self-esteem, Kiki’s success story might give you some confidence – of course, you could get 100 rejections, but maybe just by pure coincidence you get 10 approvals along the way.
Even though I don’t know Kiki – she may be super-skilled in all areas and failure was never a serious option – she definitely made me rethink my whole approach to failure. Can you get rid of the feeling that every “no” is a referendum on your value? Maybe treating rejection as a pure numbers game can give you a vaccine against many tiny defeats.
So, set a goal – for this month, or for the summer, or for the year, so that you will be told no more. Once there are a few failures, they will no longer be such a big problem. And then you can use that emotional energy for other, more important things, like writing, listening, or polishing your resume. Or even set bigger, better goals for failure that, if you’re lucky, you might simply not be able to achieve.