Here's Why Someone Would Seek Rejection for 30 Days Straight | Hacker News Reader

Here's Why Someone Would Seek Rejection for 30 Days Straight

mynorthwest.com

115 pointscaseyalbert40 comments

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.

There's another name for rejection therapy

Or "marriage."

I still don't get why in America it's popular to say that ones marriage is sexless. A study came out a few years ago trying to prove that married people were happier, but only ended up proving that on average married people have more sex.

I don't get why the joke would be funny, I would find it sad if true and bizarre if made up.

I suspect it is a misinterpretation of another fact. Very often, a couple has less sex after marriage than before. This leads married people to believe that marriage reduces sex.

With each other?

Does it matter? Report findings: get married = have more sex, on average.

Does the report find, that couples have more sex after marriage than before, or that married couples have more sex than unmarried couples?

married vs. unmarried. And keep in mind this is the average. I'm sure you can find Warren Beaty-style hounds that married couples literally wouldn't have enough waking hours to keep up with.

It's just playing off the old "ball-n-chain"-style of marriage humor often trotted out by stand-up comedians and sit-coms for a laugh. I wouldn't take it too seriously.

Yes, it's a simple if not easy path.

I'm not a "sale type" but I've actually been doing some part-time canvasing lately just to have the 'getting over the rejection hump' experience.

It's easier and more pleasant for me since sales still isn't my job.

did a small biz startup sometime ago. doing cold calling sales pitches to small restaurants will make you immune to rejection in a week.

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.

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.

"Crowdsell" (though not too different from affiliate marketing)

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.

Your comment got me thinking about how the rules of this game should perhaps be refined a little to make it more effective.

If the object of the game is to learn how to feel comfortable being rejected by people then perhaps it's better to not include rejections that result from policy in your score.

For example, if you ask for a discount in a store and the clerk rejects you, they are just acting on store policy, not giving a personal reaction.

If you sell door to door the person who tells you to get lost is most likely rejecting what you are selling or rejecting the idea of being harassed by a salesman, rather than rejecting you personally.

I guess psychology doesn't work like this. People can get quite afraid of rejections, even if it's not personal.

The original post on HN:

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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 ...

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

It's really the journey (the exercise) and not the destination (the end result/benefit).

So yes, it can be worth it just for the experience.

I think the idea is to ask for things you want. True ... you might not want them badly and the rejections might not bother you, but I look at it like a vaccination ... little doses of rejection make it so you are not afraid to be rejected when you go after the things you really want

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?

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.)

"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.

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)

No,

I have had quite a bit of trouble with rejection at different times.

My suspicion is that everyone who doesn't have some up-front, obvious fear of rejection has some other kind of fear buried somewhere in their psyche.

I think a big part of the value is experiencing rejection in a variety of scenarios, not just experiencing similar rejection repeatedly.

Rejection isn't really the goal. The goal is to find opportunities, and rejections are the indicator of whether you're trying hard enough or not. So if you're happy with the opportunities you're finding there's no need to seek out more rejection.

Excellent point. It is so useful for a lean startup situation - the objective is to find a scalable business model. Rejections are great to pivot to the right path!

I think the idea is that if you're not getting rejected you're not trying hard enough i.e. you're asking too little.

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