Failure is trying and not succeeding.
Rejection is trying but being dismissed.
Which do you prefer to spur your creativity and keep you moving forward? What was the most important failure or rejection of your career?
Here is a rumination on failure to get your juices flowing.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about success in business and rejection.
I’ve been rejected outright several times this week. I write for magazines and that means sending in a lot of ideas to editors, who may or may not need or like them. And getting lots of emails saying “No, thanks.”
Yet the rejection really doesn’t bother me. Of course I prefer when an editor buys a story, but all the no’s just mean I’m that much closer to a yes, that much closer to success.
Yesterday I found this quote, attributed to Mickey Mantle, that really hit home (pardon the pun). “During my 18 years in baseball, I came to bat almost 9,000 times. I struck out over 1,700 times and walked over 1,800 times. That means I played seven years in the major leagues without even hitting a baseball.”
It surprised me at first to discover that I wasn’t bothered by all the rejection, and could take it as part of the game, just part of doing business. It isn’t always cut and dried in business as it is in a game like baseball…sometimes rejections aren’t obvious, sometimes the stakes are incredibly high, and sometimes it all falls into place and works out.
When I’m feeling frustrated by business or a particular rejection, I just remind myself of what Edison said about genius, which is the same, I believe, for success in business: that it’s 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
What inspires you when the stress of business or the specter of rejection gets you down?