If At First

When I tuned into my public radio station this morning, I broke into a smile when I discovered they were playing one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. I’m not alone in loving that music. Classical music stations report that listener surveys always list the Concertos as a top favorite.

Did you know that this glorious series began life as a huge disappointment?

They were written as an audition for a commission Bach hoped to get with the city of Brandenburg. Bach lost the competition, but no one seems to remember who the winner was nor what music was voted superior.

Bach, of course, is not the only creative soul whose work met with failure before success came along.

According to my calculation, Dame Judi Dench has appeared in more than 75 films. In her autobiography, And Furthermore, she says she thought her acting career would be exclusively on stage.

“I had come to the firm conclusion that I had no real future in the world of film,” she writes. “When I went for my first screen test, I walked in and they were perfectly nice to me.

“Then this man, having looked at me for a long time, said, ‘Well Miss Dench, I have to tell you that you have every single thing wrong with your face.’

“So I just very quietly got up and left. I thought there is no point in going on with this.”

While history is full of stories of early defeat that turned into astonishing success later on, there is no record of all the good ideas that got put away in a drawer after encountering a first rejection.

What project have you tucked away because it didn’t get off to a great beginning? There are all sorts of reasons why success doesn’t happen the first time out.

Maybe you were ahead of your time. Or, perhaps, you needed to get some experience that would help you find a bigger and better way of doing things.

Or you may have met with failure because you hadn’t yet connected with the proper person. Why not take another look?

While I’ve never learned to love rejection, I have a calmer perspective since encountering some brilliant advice from Barbara Kingsolver. Although it’s aimed at writers, it’s equally appropriate to anyone going after a dream.

Kingsolver says, “Don’t consider your returned manuscript rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it, ‘To the editor who can appreciate my work,’ and it simply came back stamped, ‘Not at the address.’ Just keep looking for the right address.”

You might want to memorize that.

Making Peace With Rejection

I am not alone in loving Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. Classical music stations report that listener surveys always list them as a top favorite.

Did you know that this perennial favorite began life as a huge failure? 

The Concertos were written as an audition for a commission Bach hoped to get with the city of Brandenburg, Germany. Amazingly, he lost the competition.

No one seems to remember who the winner was.

Bach is not the only creative soul, of course, whose work met with rejection before success came along. Writer John Grisham sent his first novel to sixteen agents before one of them agreed to take him as a client. 

That agent submitted A Time to Kill to twenty-six publishers before one bought it, bringing out a meager 5,000 copies.

Since that humble—and humbling— beginning, Grisham has topped the bestseller charts with every book he’s written and has millions of copies of his books in print around the world.

While history is full of stories of early defeat that turned into astonishing success later on, there is no record of all the good ideas that got put away in a drawer after encountering a first rejection. 

Too many people make the classic error of deciding in advance that acceptance can only come in one way. If the prospective client or lover or friend turns us down, we may lose sight of the fact that our true goal was to make a sale or have a romance or build a new relationship. 

We forget that our goal (and our self) is just fine. We simply made the mistake of picking a dancing partner that didn’t want to dance.

Think about a time when early rejection cleared the way for something or someone better to enter your life. Use that memory to keep you going whenever you encounter rejection and you’ll pile up evidence that rejection may actually be a valuable stepping stone to your dreams. 

There’s a big difference between those who accept rejection as part of the success process and those who avoid it at all costs. Despite all the evidence that rejection is a universal theme in every success story, fear of rejection seems to be a powerful deterrent for many who will do almost anything to avoid the discomfort of being rejected. 

As it turns out, life’s grandest prizes are rejecting them.

The next time that fear of rejection stops you from tackling a dreaded task, remind yourself that the anticipation of rejection is almost always worse than the reality of it. 

All of us have known those agonizing times spent before we proposed marriage, made a sales presentation or gave a talk. 

Yet on those occasions when our worst fear were realized, the experience wasn’t nearly as horrible as imagining it had been.

So what project have you tucked away because it didn’t get off to a great start? There are all sorts of reasons why success doesn’t happen the first time out. 

Maybe you were ahead of your time. Or, perhaps, you needed to get some experience that would help you find a better way of doing things. Or you may have met with failure because you hadn’t yet connected with the proper person. 

While I still don’t love rejection, I have a clearer perspective on it since encountering some advice from writer Barbara Kingsolver. Although it’s aimed at writers, it’s equally appropriate to anyone going after a dream. 

Kingsolver says, “Don’t consider your returned manuscript rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it, ‘To the editor who can appreciate my work,’ and it simply came back stamped, ‘Not at this address.’ Just keep looking for the right address.”