Many Times, You Won't Be Enough
What to do with every NO your career will hand you.
There will be positions you don’t get because of a missing line in your CV.
There will be positions you don’t get because you don’t know the right person.
There will be shows you don’t get booked for because of your passport.
That is normal. And most of it, you cannot control.
What you can actually control
You cannot control the missing line, the missing contact, or the passport. What you can control is what you do with the NO.
Every career hands you a pile of them. If you let each rejection pull you into a dark place, you will be miserable often, because the NOs never fully stop coming. The people who last in this business are not the ones who get rejected less. They are the ones who recover faster.
The man in the arena
More than a hundred years ago, in his speech Citizenship in a Republic, delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1910, Theodore Roosevelt said it better than anyone since:
“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.”
The critic in the seats does not get rejected, because the critic never applies. The NOs are the receipt that you were in the arena. They are proof you were striving for something, not watching from the stands.
What 27 years taught me
I have had four jobs in a career of twenty-seven years. Between them, I have been rejected hundreds of times. Literally hundreds. Many of those were positions I was sure were my dream job.
Here is what life showed me, one NO at a time:
Keep working hard.
Find the skills you are missing.
Don’t take it personally.
Let life do its work. There is almost always something good ahead.
None of those are dramatic. They are the boring, repeatable things that carry you through a bad week and into the next opportunity.
The door you didn’t apply for
Here is the part nobody tells you when you are staring at a rejection email.
Many times, the job you wanted so badly would not have been that great. You built it up in your head, and the reality would have fallen short. And the door that opens unexpectedly, the one you were not even chasing, is often the one that brings exactly what you were looking for.
You cannot see that in the moment. You can only see it looking back. So when the next NO lands, and it will, treat it as normal. Then get back in the arena.
A rejection is the receipt that proves you were in the arena, not watching from the seats.
What is one NO from your career that, looking back, cleared the way for something better?
See you next week.
Oscar S.