Getting to “No.”
My friend, Lisa, in an effort to cheer me up about how much querying sucks, told me about a social experiment she saw on Instagram. A creator she follows is trying to get 1,000 “No’s” in a single year. The gist of it is…. this woman (I picture her as Wonder Woman) is asking for whatever she wants with a goal of getting 1,000 rejections. She keeps track of how many people say “no” to her and then updates her followers about what went down and her new total rejection count.
It’s called “Pursuing Rejection.” Yes, on purpose.
So much to unpack here….
Let’s start with the non-obvious (at least to me) result of pursuing rejection — getting all kinds of unexpected “Yes’s.”
Imagine walking into your favorite posh retail shop that sells bespoke tiaras and asking if you can put one on your dog and take a picture of said dog posing on their hot pink velvet chaise lounge. …and they say “YES”. …and then you get the most amazing picture of Miss Cha-cha DiGregorio, your pug-chihuahua mix, in a tiara looking adorable.
Mind blown.
Another non-obvious side effect of pursuing rejection is giving ourselves permission to hear the word “no” and reframing it as a positive. Could we actually rewire our brains to see getting rejected as a positive instead of a negative?
Let’s say I set a goal to get 50 agent rejections in the next three months. I’m not talking about purposely sabotaging myself by sending poor quality query materials, but giving myself permission to query agents without fear, dread, panic, or sadness (aka the Four Horsemen of My Query Apocalypse). Or giving myself permission to query heavy hitter agents who routinely handle celebrity deals. What I’m getting at is…. What if rejection weren’t just a part of the journey but part of the goal?
Mind blown. Again.
The obvious part of pursuing rejection is… getting rejected. But pursuing anything, increases your odds of success by getting the rejections out of the way. Right? I don’t have math to support this but I bet it maths.
So here’s to reframing how we think of rejection getting more people to tell us no. …I bet we’ll get some unexpected yeses along the way.
