

Here's Why Someone Would Seek Rejection for 30 Days Straight - caseyalbert
http://mynorthwest.com/category/news_chick_blog/20101110/Seeking-rejection-for-30-days/

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holdenc
There's another name for rejection therapy -- it's called sales work.

Typically it's the kind of sales work hackers dislike. But plenty of people
have built good careers around a sunny tolerance for rejection. Real estate
agents, insurance sales people, cold callers, door-to-door sales people -- all
of them experience many rejections for each closed sale.

One successful sales person told me that "it's just a numbers game." I still
think about this with every rejection I receive.

~~~
JCThoughtscream
I'm currently a salesguy doing door-to-door work for a telecom fiber optic
campaign. I wouldn't quite call it a "sunny" attitude, but you definitely get
used to it very, very fast.

It's vanishingly rare that rejections are actually personal in any real sense
anyhow. At least when business is concerned. Heck, even when they know you,
it's rarely personal - personal circumstances and biases are a far greater
factor than any real animosity.

Except for a few comical asides, you never remember the no's anyhow.

~~~
johnyzee
Actually, when you're a developer trying to sell your own creation, you can
easily take rejection personally. Maybe this is why hackers hate sales.

This leads me to an idea: What about if a bunch of hacker entrepreneurs got
together and agreed to try to sell _eachother's_ products? It could actually
be fun to try to pitch something where you have no emotional investment in the
product. Naturally you would do your best to succeed and agree to document all
the responses from prospective clients.

~~~
guylhem
And maybe like, the hacker doing selling part could receive some financial
incentive to overcome the wasted time. And that incentive would of course be
given by the hacker whose product is sold, because he could make a profit on
that experiment. And like, part of it would be fixed, and part of it would
depend on the acceptance, which could be called conversion rate?

Congrats, you've just invented the salesman :-) Joke aside, it might be fun to
try to do some sales time to time.

------
quickpost
The original post on HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1754790>

~~~
akkartik
Eliezer: _"Did anyone else glance at this, think "rationality level too low, I
cannot trust anything these people say" and give up?"_
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755741>)

My response is to quote Nassim Taleb: "Be gullible in the small, and skeptical
in the large." <http://akkartik.name/blog/9400292> It's an _extremely_
rational strategy.

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dspeyer
I really want to see a journal of someone who tried this: what they asked for,
what was surprisingly accepted and how rejections were issued.

~~~
benchmark
I think HN member Jason Shen is on the fourth week of the 30 day challenge
right now (although he hasn't posted about it yet):
[http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/the-rejection-therapy-
challeng...](http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/the-rejection-therapy-challenge-
week-2/)

------
catshirt
Why not just do things you _actually want to do_?

If they work, great.

If they don't, and you tried really hard, I can't imagine anything more likely
to help desensitize you.

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jasonshen
Thanks for checking this out guys. I think it's been a great experience - and
I actually work in sales so I already deal with a great deal of rejection.
I'll be writing a summary of my experiences soon so stay tuned ...

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binomial
Google "social skydiving" for people's experiences doing this kind of thing.

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oceanician
Sounded like the typical dating website - before I read it. Much more
intriguing.

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jpwagner
is it still worth the effort to try things that you don't actually want?

seems to me that not only will you not feel the pain of rejection, you also
won't be able to reap the benefit when there's an unexpected yes.

~~~
paulgb
The reward is realizing that the pain of being rejected is negligible.

~~~
jpwagner
but there is no pain if you don't have any expectation!

~~~
David
That's the goal, anyway. Some of us aren't there yet. Rejection of any kind,
even for something that wasn't expected in the first place, can be painful.

------
joe_the_user
Is there something special about getting one rejection each day?

I've been doing part-time canvasing and I can accumulate far more than 30
rejections in the less than an hour.

But I still have no-rejection days. Does it matter?

~~~
David
It's not about being rejected _every single day_. It's about learning to
accept rejection more easily, which it sounds like you're doing fine on with
part-time canvasing. (Or perhaps you could cope easily before that.)

I'd take a bet that you're not the type this was designed for. For some, being
rejected at all is a huge blow to ego, confidence, and self-esteem, which can
have serious effects on mood and productivity, for instance.

For these people, getting rejected more often means that each rejection is
less significant and reinforces the knowledge that rejection happens. That is
much healthier, and I'd hypothesize that it can increase one's average level
of happiness. (It also gives an individual much more control over himself --
or takes it away from others, at any rate. Same thing.)

~~~
zephyrfalcon
"For some, being rejected at all is a huge blow to ego, confidence, and self-
esteem, which can have serious effects on mood and productivity, for instance.
For these people, getting rejected more often means that each rejection is
less significant and reinforces the knowledge that rejection happens."

Yes, but this sort of "therapy" only works if you have the right thought
patterns to go with the rejection (i.e. not taking it too personally,
realizing it's not that big of a deal, etc). It may not work so well if you
(were raised to) believe that you have to please others in order to feel good
about yourself. In that case, each rejection is just more evidence that "you
suck", and you enter a downward spiral.

~~~
David
That's what makes the game hard, and also what makes it worth it. The key is
that repeated exposure leads to desensitization.

Fear of rejection is no different from other irrational (or at least
maladaptive) fears -- and those often _are_ treated by repeated exposure to
the source of the fear.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desensitization_(psychology)>

