Reject Rejection!

Jack Canfield - cocreator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Reject Rejection, If you are going to be successful, you are going to need to learn how to deal with rejection. Rejection is a natural part of life. You get rejected when you aren't picked for the team, don't get the part in the play, don't get elected, don't get into the college or graduate school of your choice, don't get the job or promotion you wanted, don't get the raise you wanted, don't get the appointment you requested, or get fired. You get rejected when your manuscript is rejected, your proposal is turned down, your new product idea is passed over, your fund-raising request is ignored, your design concept is not accepted, your application for membership is denied, or your offer of marriage is not accepted.

Rejection is a myth! another concept cited by Jack Canfield. To get over rejection, you have to realize that rejection is really a myth. It doesn't really exist. It is simply a concept that you hold in your head. Think about it. If you ask Patty to have dinner with you and she says no, you didn't have anyone to eat dinner with before you asked her, and you don't have anyone to eat dinner with after you asked her. The situation didn't get worse; it stayed the same. It only gets worse if you go inside and tell yourself something extra like "See, Mother was right. No one will ever like me. I am the slug of the universe!".

Everyone who has ever made it to the top has to endure rejections. You just have to realize that they are not personal. Consider the following:

1. When Alexander Graham Bell offered the rights to the telephone for $100,000 to Carl Orton, president of Western Union, Orton replied, "What use would this company make of an electrical toy?"

2. Angie Everhart, who started modeling at the age of 16, was once told by model agency owner Eileen Ford that she would never make it as a model. Why not? "Redheads don't sell." Everhart later became the first redhead in history to appear on the cover of Glamour magazine, had a great modeling career, and then went on to appear in 27 films and numerous TV shows.

3. Novelist Stephen King almost made a multimillion-dollar mistake when he threw his Carrie manuscript in the garbage because he was tired of the rejections. "We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias, " he was told. "They do not sell." Luckily, his wife fished it out of the garbage. Eventually Carrie was printed by another publisher, sold more than 4 million copies, and was made into a blockbuster film.

4. In 1998, Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page approached Yahoo! and suggested a merger. Yahoo! could have snapped up the company for a handful of stock, but instead they suggested that the young Googlers keep working on their little school project and come back when they had grown up. Within 5 years, Google had an estimated market capitalization of $20 billion. At the time of this writing, they were about to launch an initial public offering auction that eventually raised $1.67 billion.