You Gotta Be In It To Win It
Why you should stop the self-reject and go after your dreams.
What are you forfeiting because you’re saying “No” to yourself? What streams of opportunities are passing you by because you seemed to have got it figured out that you can’t have them? Why bother trying since your effort is doomed to failure?
You want the job but you already figured out that you’ll be rejected if you apply, so you declined?
You want to write the book, but you already figured out nobody will read it except, of course, your octogenarian grandmother, who doesn’t have much else to do with her time?
You want to get the raise, but you figured out already that the answer would be no, so you don’t bother to ask?
You want to write for that publication but you’ve already convinced yourself that it’s is for writers better than you. As for you, your ideas are rubbish and your writing, horrible.
You’ve toned down and resigned to a lesser ambition as you’ve got it perfectly figured out that someone so ordinary as you is not worthy of any high aspiration?
These are various manifestation of self-rejection.
Saying No to yourself. Denying you ever nourished the dream just because you think you’ve figured out that you can’t have it.
Self-rejection feels safe for a while, until.
Self rejection feels harmless, safe even cozy. Until, that is, you discover the ever growing mountain of regret building up around you. Until you find yourself sat there wondering what could have been if you had dared to take the chance?
Could you have gotten the job?
Could you have gotten the admission? The scholarship?
Could what is gathering dust on your hard drive have been a bestseller? Could it have been a story that will set someone’s soul alight?
Could you have gotten the raise?
Could you have made a difference if you had given the encouragement anyway?
We make the mistake all the time.We say No to ourselves. We park out dreams. We fail to go for it.
When we say No to ourselves before we hear it from the world, we know we’ve got at least one possibility ruled out: we won’t get to hear it from the world.
Because that stings.
It hurts.
It hurts to get the email, “your application was unsuccessful this time”.
It hurts to hear your boss turn down your request for promotion.
It hurts to release your 40,000-word tome to the world laden with grand expectation to only two sales in 4 months — one from your close friend out of pity for your hard work and the other from your sister, for roughly the same reason. Yikes.
If you tell yourself No before any of these scenario could happens at least you can feel safe for a while. You get to avoid the pain of rejection, the pain of failure, of falling flat on your face.
But what happens when, sooner or later, you’re forced to deal face to face with the pain of regret gnawing at your soul? The pain of what could have been?
Self-rejection is Just a Symptom
Self-rejection is the indicator that you have given the fear of failure an out-sized importance. You have become so scared of failing at something — at anything — that you self-reject, a fancy way of saying you decide not to try at all.
You allow the fear of failure to wrap up in its claws till you begin to undermine your own efforts — subconsciously — to ward off the possibility of a larger failure.
When you fear failure so much, it makes doing nothing more attractive and therefore you resist moving forward. You miss great opportunities.
But here’s something you must get. It’s not nicety but its true.
If you are not folding your arms hoping the wind of fortune blow in your favour, if you go out and go after what you want, if you go chasing your dreams, putting your time, effort, energy into achieving something worthwhile, then it’s as close as to a guarantee as you can get:
You’ll get rejected a lot. You’ll fail a lot.
Your ideas will be rejected, your efforts, your offers, your writing, your application, your prose, your essay, your appeal, etc, will be deemed not-worthy.
See, Rejecters are everywhere — some lurking, some in plain sight: agents, editors, reviewers, award-givers, readers, your boss, admission board, scholarship board, curators…name them.
You have to be cool with that.
You have to see the reality that those who succeed a lot also fail a lot. “The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.” is how Stephen McCranie succinctly put it.
What you should not do — or stop doing — is self-rejecting.
Yes, rejection is painful but it’s a risk we must take — and one worth taking. The alternative is living with the bucketloads of regrets and missed opportunities.
You can recognize that getting punched in the face just comes with the territory. If you get in the ring you’ll (more than likely) get punched in the face. You can decide to roll with the punches and carry on fighting. And you might, who knows, get to a point where you get rejected — just like several before — but it doesn’t elicit the same visceral reaction it used to. And, you, my friend, are growing.
What Are The Odds?
The question we often ask is what are the chances?
And it’s a very good question to ask. You want to know what you’re giving your time, your energy, your resources to. You want to know if you’re not wasting a bullet. Makes perfect sense.
But the answer often is: it’s hard to tell.
It’s hard to know if that job application is the one that will land your dream job.
It’s hard to know if that next business will be a successes or a failure.
It’s hard to know if that next article is the one that will go crazily viral.
But you know what’s easier to know?
It is that if you don’t make the attempt, the odds quickly tumbles to zero.
Think about that.
“If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward you’re always in the same place.”
Here’s the one thing that’s abundantly clear, above all else:
You gotta be in it to win it.
So, stop the self-reject and go after your dreams. Start today.
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