Rejection Olympics

Over these last two weeks, my professor challenged our class to go out and commit acts where we would likely face rejection. He laid out the challenge in a BINGO card format and we were instructed to complete a row of challenges. The challenges I was tasked with were as follows:
• Ask for a discount before purchasing anything
• Invite someone you’ve never socialized with out for coffee/lunch/dinner
• Ask a stranger to sit down and take a break
• Reach out to a friend or family member who has shunned you

The reason for this exercise was to expose our class to the feeling of failure and rejection by pushing us outside of our comfort zone, however if I am honest, I did not find it that uncomfortable to complete most of the tasks. The only one that made me feel slightly uncomfortable was reaching out to a friend who had shunned me, while the rest were relatively easy. Throughout my life, whether it has been through sports, academics, or starting a business, I have always pushed myself to my limits, and often come up short. As a result, I have become accustomed to the feeling of failure. Over the last three years I have been teaching myself how to trade stocks, immersing myself in the world of financial markets and consistently challenging myself to learn new things every day. Since I had nobody to guide me, the only way I could learn was through trying and failing. I have tried and failed in so many ways that at this point, I no longer fear failure, but welcome it with open arms. I now understand the importance of failure in learning, as failing does not make you a failure, it just shows you what you do not know yet. The types of failures/rejections I was faced with for this challenge just did not compare to the failures I have endured while learning new things on my own, as such most of the tasks weren’t particularly challenging.

I think that reaching out to a friend that shunned me was the most difficult because it had the potential for a negative outcome, while the rest just felt a little awkward in the moment but would be inconsequential one minute later. This highlighted for me the impact that stakes have on our outlook on failure/ rejection; the higher the stakes, the more you want to avoid a situation or task. When I write it out it sounds like common sense, but being aware of this before a situation/task can be critical to whether you go through with it in the end. This is because the awareness of what is influencing you, can make you cancel out unnecessary biases causing you to fear failure. This is why before entering the conversation I made sure to go over how it could go badly so that I am prepared for failure, rather than trying to avoid it.

In the end, although this exercise did not impact me the way I believe it was intended to, I nonetheless was able to draw significant value for how to approach future situations where failure is a possibility. First, I reinforced the importance of being aware of how the stakes of a task/situation affect your perception of failure, and second, I relearned the importance of preparing for worst case so that when failure happens you are not surprised.