#fail – 922

100 Rejections in 2018

I have yet another miniGoal for #in2018. I will try and get 100 rejections.

Like most projects, this started with an impulse. And like all things that I do, I put the impulse in action. See this tweet.

So, what is it?
In one line, I will try and get a 100 rejection letters #in2018.

What is a rejection? What is a rejection letter?
Lemme try and example with an example. What if I ask a Rabbi Shergill if I can work with him? Afterall I’ve been a fan and all that since his Bulla days. His music and his philosophy has been a big big reason of my fandom.

However, there is no clear value proposition for a Rabbi Shergill to choose to work with me. And there no reason why he should accept me!

So, in all probability, he will reject the request. Assuming that he will get time to see my request – he being busy and famous at the same time! If he gets back to him and says that he doesnt want to work with me, that to me is a rejection.

Other example, when I travel for work, can I ask for the client to pay for a business class ticket (about 3x the price of an economy ticket)? I know I am not important enough for most of my clients to give me a superior treatment. The request will probably get rejected. Assuming I am not laughed at. Ok this was a bad example. Because this is a recurring event. Everytime I fly, I want to travel business. May be it is not. Some clients may reject. Some may not. Some may give in. Some may not, Some projects could have budget. Some may not. Need to think more.

The definition of rejection (for the sake of this project) thus, is an ask that I know is almost impossible to get. The ask is so big, so audacious, so stupid, so ridiculous that it is bound to get rejected. The ask that I shouldnt be making in the first place. And since the ask if going to get rejected, I’d not feel bad when it is rejected.

So, I will send a request. And the person, company he can choose to ignore it, accept it or reject it. Unless I get a feedback from him, I will not put this in any basket. I’d just call it waiting for inputs.

The next step is kinda fuzzy. What if you dont hear back (either acceptance or rejection), you send a reminder? Of course you could sound creepy (or desperate). Or you could sound enterprising and persistent and all. I am not sure of this one. Will think and update it over time. #note2self.

How did I get the idea?
Three things had to come together to make this happen.

A. I saw this TED talk by Jia and I have been meaning to implement it. Why? Because its a social experiment and it makes you get out of your comfort zone. Its been on the todo list but I never got around to it. May be this is the time?

B. I met Hareesh Sir and talked to him about my failure to grow business at C4E. He said that unless you get rejected a million times, you cant say you have failed. So, I want to get rejected.

C. I saw this tweet and was surprised to know that people achieve such amazing feats that it makes you go wow! And like you, they are made of same chemical components and all that. So, if they can, why cant you? Kiki worked towards getting a 100 rejection letters. That means that at the response rate of about 1%, she would’ve taken 10000 shots! If she can, why cant I?

And why would I want to get rejected these many times?
I think the biggest thing we fear as humans is, “what if I get rejected!” or “what would the world say.” By getting rejected a 100 times in the next 6-7 months, I will probably get over the fear. Jia did. Kiki probably did. I can too.

Plus, if I do get rejected, I can tell myself that the ask was so big that it was anyway gonna get rejected. I would thus probably feel little less bad.

And finally if I hit acceptance, I am sure it would make like better! Oh, this also means that I need to choose what I need to get an acceptance on. I need a filter. So, the process, the model is, when I chase rejections, in case I do get an acceptance on it, the resulting #win has to take me closer to my three lifeGoals (Everest, Billion People, Billion Dollars). This is how my project differs from that of Jia’s.

So, what is the plan?
Rather than putting a strict goal, task frequency, cadence etc, I will try and get a 100 rejections in this year. These would be a mix of personal, work, random and otherwise.

Oh, I made the first request already. To Rabbi Shergill. Let’s see what do I get.

I will catalog all my requests and rejections on this post. And on this twitter thread.

List of all requests.
#1. 8Jun18. No response yet.
Requested Rabbi Shergill to meet me and allow me to work with him.

#2. NoDate. No response yet.
Requested a professor from MDI if I could work with him on creating a new model for marketing. He showed initial interest but nothing happened after that.

#3. NoDate. No response yet.
Requested the dean at SPJain if I could meet him and may be teach at SPJ.

#4. 24Jun18. No response yet.
Requested another professor at another business school if I could teach at his.

UPDATE: This updating of the blog was getting way too much. Tracking it on an open Google Sheet. Link here.

***

Thats about it! Wish me luck! And do try it for yourself.
Thank you. Over and out.
SG

PS: Can I turn this on the head and rather gun for 100 acceptances? And that means I will have to ask for a million things (assuming 1 in 100 is granted). Need to think. #note2self.

PPS: I love how this blog is becoming a dialogue with self. I just wish I could find a way to catalog these thoughts and share these with people that I trust and value and then get them to debate with me on the outcomes. Any ideas anyone?

PPPS: What if I say that rather than trying to feel less bad about getting rejected, how about I try harder and get it? I think I cant do that because for a scatterbrain like me, I simply cant go deep with everything!

PPPPS: Rant ahead.

So there are a million things that I want to do in life and because there is one life and anything you want to do takes time to do, its humanly impossible to do all those. But then I may argue that if I attempt to do all these million things, I will probably end up doing a handful of those. And that to me is a #win automatically.

Not a bad theory to subscribe to. As long as I take shots at each of these things.

And to take a shot at these things, I need access. Access to people, ideas, resources, capital, time and all those things. And more importantly, I need permission. Again, from people and others that will enable those things. And acceptance that they’d help me. Thing is, acceptance to me is the biggest gift (apart from attention) that you can give someone. And since acceptance is such a big deal, you often dont get it!

Coming back.

I need to do a million things and often I dont ~~get to those~~ even start working on things because I assume that the other person, that the thing is dependent on, will reject the idea. And this fear of rejection is the biggest bane to getting things done!

So, I thought, can I fix it? Can I somehow get over this fear of rejection!

One of the mental models that I subscribe to, is, Invert, always invert. In one line, the idea is that if you reverse the problem you are facing, you often get to the solution. You know that thing where the guy says if he knew where is he gonna die, he’d never go there? That! This entire fear of rejection looked like an interesting problem to apply this mental model on.

And hence, I started with the thesis that if I chase rejections (rather than permission, acceptance etc.), I will probably do well! Ergo, this post and the project.

Here it is – the writer’s block!

I think its a been a week since I started that little project and it was good going. Till some days back. When the writers block hit me. And I did not write then. I did not write yesterday either. And I did not write the day before. And the day before that.

I have all the excuses that the men have come up with, since time immemorial – no time, no inspiration, no ideas, no laptop to write on, no electricity at home etc.

But end of the day, all these are mere excuses and nothing else. I really enjoyed those nights when I dint sleep and I wrote. When I deliberated over each word that I want to put forth on the blog. When I searched for etymology, origins, synonyms, antonyms etc of words. When I went back and forth and changed tenses and grammar, since I suck so much at it. When I desperately tracked new visitors and ~~growth~~ stagnation in the charts. ~~When I reply to numerous comments~~ (for some reason I still dont get any comments on the blog, so cant track those). When I pimped the links of new posts on social networks and other such places. When I waited desperately to get feedback on what I write from friends and strangers.

~~Those were good days~~ It was a brilliant week. And that week taught me that I am not as fickle minded as I think I am and once I put my head to something, I can actually do it. Good news for Nidhi Kapoor. I sincerely hope Nidhi does not meet the same fate as the guard of clock tower. In fact I hope that Nidhi would bring the good old guard back to life, if all goes well.

And there is another learning. I got obsessed with writing. Everything else that I spend my time on, ideas, businesses, talking, reading, exploring, surfing , thinking was all put to rest. I was focused on writing. The entire day, I would look for things and ideas that I could write about. And I could not wait for the night to arrive before I pen the thoughts down. Apart from writing, the other two things that have ngrossed me so much were code and poker. Thanks to my MBA, I cant code no more. And thanks to my peanut sized brain, I can not play poker no more.

But, but I can write. No one else can take that away from me. Its a singular activity that requires little or no influence from other factors. I dont need money, I dont need resources, I dont need physical fitness, I dont need a large team. All I need is little motivation and I need Google to research what I am writing about. For something like clock tower, I dont even need to research! I just need to do. To turn up everyday. And ship. A really good friend told me about how Charles Dickens wrote a lot of his work. He would publish things in a periodical and then work on the next chapters. I think I can relate to what he was doing. May be he also needed motivation, push to work. And this was his way to continue writing the longish pieces of texts. Note to self – read the tale of two cities.

Coming back, I need to get back to writing. And start writing lot more. Everyday. 1000 words.

Update on the Eco Mode

via This Isnt Happiness

You may remember a recent post about I going into the Eco Mode for the next few days.

I thought about it on the 14th of August and buxfer tells me that since then, I have actually spent more money than I spend otherwise. In terms of numbers, of everything I spent in August, I spent almost 80% in just the last week! (Or read this as… I spent 4 times more money in last week than in all the other three weeks combined)

How #fail is that!

And now what has happened has happened. All I can do is try and control my expense in the remainder of the month and then maybe, spend wisely in the next month as well.

the curious case of missing cases!

Sony Vaio Screenshot

ever since I have started writing, which is i think more than 15 years ago, i have always been very cognizant of the grammar and style and punctuation and other such things. of all the things, i was totally a sucker for punctuation. i learnt about commas full stops, exclamations and even ellipses. i ensured that watever i wrote, whenever i wrote, in whatever medium, i got my grammar correct. in fact i was so obsessed with it that i started judging people on the punctuation marks they used, or dint use, depending on the case.

but then one fine day my laptop stopped working. in lieu, my office got a Sony Vaio and like all products that are designed without a thought, steve jobs would have hated this laptop, this Vaio is a classic #fail. for some reason, the designers of this laptop decided to reduce the size of the shift key and made it as ~~big~~ small as the other keys are. as a result, people like me (who have learnt typing the hard way on desktop keyboards and who type really fast) find it tough to stop the stream of thought, look up for the shift key and then press it along with the required key to change the case, inset an exclamation mark etc. it hit my productivity and ideas harder than non availability of good music to help you think.

at first i coped up by typing things like i normally do – fast and without looking at the keyboard; And then run a spell check and get most of the cases right. but then it was wasting just too much time and since time is most precious commodity that we humans have, i decided to drop cases altogether till i get rid of this wretched Sony. the drop in case came not as an idea but as a reflex, a revolt against this badly designed laptop. Sony, are you listening? also, if you are, please note that conventions and norms such as qwerty order and placement of shift keys etc have been developed over the years and it takes time to insert a new radical change, like the size of the shift key. if you think customers would accept it, no they wont. sorry, you are mistaken. if i were the ceo or something, i would’ve asked the team that even dared to reduce the size to leave. you must do so imho. and no, am not exaggerating.

and for everyone around me, all i expect from you guys for the time being, is to be a bit tolerant about these stupid misuse of cases. i cant help things to be honest. please excuse me and please do not judge me. in return, i promise to drop ~~cases~~ opinions that i had created against all the people who’ve ignored cases in the past. who knows, may be they use a Sony as well?