Savor the Liberation of Rejection

Don’t fear it, thrive on it!

By Jesse Rogers

The Startup is the largest and most prestigious publication on Medium. It is home to the consistently high-earning authors that we all dream of being.

It can feel intimidating for new writers to submit work to a publication like this, but the truth is that there is strictly upside. As long as you’re submitting your own legitimate work that you think has a credible shot of being something that editors could want to publish, then there is absolutely no downside whatsoever. The worst that can go wrong is that they’ll be grateful for your attempt and send you this.

Hi there, Thanks for sharing your story with us. We appreciate the opportunity to consider it but have to pass this time. We hope you’ll submit again soon. All the best, — The Startup.

That’s all. A kind note of encouragement to “try again” is the absolute worst thing that can possibly happen to you by giving it a serious go.

My economics and statistics training has conditioned my psychology towards looking at everything through the lens of expected value. As an example of what this means, the expected value for putting $100 down on red in a game of roulette is the probability that you win times the outcome gained from winning added to the probability of losing times the probability that you lose. In our case

Gain is $100 * 18 reds/38 pockets = $47.37

Loss is $100 * 20 non-reds/38 pockets = -$52.63

Expected Value = -$5.26

That means you’re expecting to lose an average of $5.26 every time you put $100 on red in roulette. Now you don’t always lose, of course. At a friend’s bachelor party in Vegas, one of the guys in our wolfpack got lucky and turned $600 into something like $6,000 playing just blackjack and roulette! But that was all luck. The odds were against him.

What’s the expected value of submitting an article to The Startup if you think there’s only a 10% chance that they may want it?

What makes the calculation tricky is that the gain is potentially unlimited, but for argument’s sake let’s say that the Medium Partner Program earnings plus the exposure, credibility, and new followers equals $1000 in value over the next 2 years if it gets published.

Then with those assumptions

Gain is $1000 * 10% chance = $100

Loss is $0 * 90% chance = $0

Expected Value = $100

It sounds cliche to say “you have nothing to lose”, but it’s not only true, it is mathematically sound.

Most high-return investments either require money, have a high degree of risk, and/or require a large amount of time to get the payoff. By contrast, writing a story and submitting first it to the best available publication for that niche only carries the risk of hearing “no”. And it isn’t even really a hard “no, you’re not good enough”. It’s a “thanks, not yet but keep trying”.

Meanwhile, others benefit too. By trying to get into a top publication you’ll be aiming high and improving your writing. Even if you’re rejected, by writing at the limits of your best quality, you’ll submit sharper work to whichever lucky backup publisher you do eventually decide to go with.

Think about this from the second-choice publisher’s perspective. If created my own publication called “Jesse’s Startup Reject Pile” that accepted nothing but The Startup’s leftovers, I can guarantee the quality of those decent-but-not-quite-what-they-want-this-month articles which got a thumb’s down from the editors would still be amazing quality compared to average content either on Medium or the internet at large. Good enough to be a high-level publication on its own merit, in fact.

Frankly, I would absolutely love to run a publication that did nothing but publish the leftover rejected articles of Tim Denning, Ayodeji Awosika, and Jon Brosio if only I could get my hands on them. As the saying goes, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”, so I’m not even kidding guys, let’s do this!

You may have guessed by now that this story was itself passed over by The Startup, but you’re still reading it anyway because valuable work always finds a home.

If you want to know why out of all the publications I could have gone with I decided that the home for this particular story should be ILLUMINATION, it is because of my enormous admiration for Dr Mehmet Yildiz. When I wrote this, I didn’t even have to wonder if he’s on the same page as I am, I already knew based on his previous actions and the culture he’s built.

All I had to do is go looking for his statement on the matter.

The only organizations which confident, healthy people like myself are ever willing to partner with are the ones that think like Dr. Yildiz (please, I beg you, go back and read that story if you haven’t. It really is fantastic, almost every line is highlighted by his readers).

He’s too gracious to say this quite so bluntly, but I’m not: any publisher that would demand exclusivity as a precondition for affiliation is simply not worth your time no matter how large they are or what they can offer you.

Anyone who would cut you off for trying to reach higher and doing what’s best for you is not someone you’ll want to partner with anyway. So that’s not really a loss if a publication ever drops you as “punishment”.

Once again… you have absolutely nothing to fear through having the courage to seek out the best possible publication in your niche and getting rejected by them 9 times out of 10. I get rejected too. Frequently. That’s just part of what’s involved in writing for top publications. And it only makes me feel more powerful every time I get rejected because I’ve made myself immune to its sting. It’s like getting knocked down by the powerful waves at the beach, and excitedly getting back up again — because you can.

The only thing at risk from rejection is your ego. And if your ego is holding you back from your dreams… don’t you want to lose your ego anyway? Don’t you want to be liberated from it?

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” — Seneca