Lessons Learned from 100 Days of Rejection with Jia Jiang
The Unmistakable Creative Podcast
Srinivas Rao
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2015
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode Jia Jiang shares his story of how he turned 100 days of rejection into a life changing experience and a full blown movement including a published book and the creation of something called the rejection gym.
- Why there’s no such thing as a perfect time
- Looking for rejection instead of running away from it
- How our stories turn into noble excuses
- Learning to turn our obstacles into opportunities
- Why many of our failures have a hidden purpose
- Uncovering the bigger meaning and purpose in our lives
- How to gradually increase your tolerance for risk
- Using rejection to expand the boundaries of your comfort zone
- Learning not to take rejection personally
- How Jia ended up teaching a class at UT-Austin
- Become action focused instead of results focused
Resources
Jia Jiang came to the United States with the dream of being the next Bill Gates. But despite early success in the corporate world, his first attempt to pursue his entrepreneurial dream ended in rejection. Jia was crushed, and spiraled into a period of deep self doubt. But he realized that his fear of rejection was a bigger obstacle than any single rejection would ever be, and he needed to find a way to cope with being told no without letting it destroy him. Thus was born his “100 days of rejection” experiment, during which he willfully sought rejection on a daily basis–from requesting a lesson in sales from a car salesman (no) to asking a flight attendant if he could make an announcement on the loud speaker (yes) to his famous request to get Krispy Kreme doughnuts in the shape of Olympic rings (yes, with a viral video to prove it).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When you're are entrepreneur you feel like those transformative moments you can try anything you want you can do anything you want in your lives and and that was a time and I was like you know I just want to turn this into something interesting for me. |
| 0:13.5 | I just want to see if this can have any self-help or meaning in my own life. |
| 0:20.5 | So instead of just running away or just try to get over quickly, I turn that into something fun. |
| 0:27.0 | And this has taught me a lesson, meaning like every time we have a failure we can turn those failures or into something useful |
| 0:36.6 | because there are a lot more many people who have failures and if you can learn from the failure and actually share your failure if you are brave enough to say what you learn from this failure. |
| 0:48.0 | And you can turn something really bad into something really good. |
| 0:52.0 | And in my case, it became a life mission. |
| 0:55.0 | I'm Sreni Rao and this is the Unmistakable Creative Podcast |
| 1:02.0 | where you get a window into the stories and insights of the most innovative and creative minds |
| 1:06.0 | who started movements, built thriving businesses, written best selling books, and created insanely interesting art. |
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