Celebrating rejection

Hi all, I wrote an article about an unusual way to manage rejection that I thought might be of interest here, especially in light of the competitive market for jobs that a lot of EAs pursue (e.g. this recent post about the costs of rejection and this post about how many nos one EA faced down until they finally got a job in Congress).

The basic idea is to create a system to log, share, and celebrate rejections with a relatively small group of people. (I personally recommend keeping it small so that everyone in the group feels invested in one another’s work/well-being.) The piece unpacks why rejection is so tough, illustrates how this system came to be, and what about it helps people effectively manage rejection.

For years, I used a different system to cope with rejections: I kept a private record of my rejections in a running Google doc (which I called “Valiant Efforts”). While it made rejection sting a little less, I’ve found this collective system way more motivating. Some things it could do for you:

Give you perspective on how much other people are getting rejected and, in doing so, take much of the shame out of rejection
Encourage you to apply for more things and take bigger risks
Provide community during the often-isolating experience of rejection

If you’d like to start a group, there’s an example of a rejection collection and spreadsheet template here and more info about rejection collections in Barbara Sarnecka’s book, which she’s made freely available here.

And here’s my article: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/01/celebrate-your-rejections-failures/621327/