Jia Jiang plays the startup game better than anyone — and he’s been rejected over 100 times, according to BYU Magazine. Those numbers would be enough to get anybody down, but according to the article, the TED Talk presenter, speaker, author and founder of Wuju Learning sought what he calls “rejection therapy” on purpose.
Instead of becoming discouraged when he received a firm “no” from a potential investor in the early days of his startup, Jiang created a list of 100 ways he could become desensitized to the pain of rejection, the article said. Although that list was a little on the crazy side — turns out requesting a "burger refill" from Five Guys was a no-go — Jiang also found that in asking for the impossible, he sometimes received a resounding “yes.”
Those affirmative responses, the article said, meant more to Jiang than getting Olympic-shaped doughnut rings from Krispy Kreme or having confidence in starting a business. They also helped him see that “fear of rejection is far worse than rejection itself, because it stops us from trying things,” he told BYU Magazine.
“People who really change the world, who change the way we live and the way we think, were the people who were met with initial and often violent rejection,” Jiang continued in the article. “People like Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and even Jesus Christ. These people did not let rejection define them. They let their reaction, after rejection, define them.”