🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️

REJECTED! 😭 😭 😭

How often has your heart sunk as you read that e-mail, or received that phone call.

Whether it’s a job application, promotion, grant or fellowship proposal, award or prize nomination – whatever it is, rejection can take a toll.

And, at least for me, many hundreds of rejections later, it’s never gotten “easy”. Easier perhaps, but never easy!

In my newest video, I cover key concepts for understanding and managing rejection in a professional context. I differentiate between useful and useless types of rejection. I cover the key concept of volatility with an illustrative example, and present a range of very simple strategies for managing and responding to rejection.

Please reshare if useful 🙏

🕒 Timestamps are as follows:

📌 (0:00) Rejection Montage
📌 (0:05) Professional Rejection Is Ever-Present
📌 (0:13) Rejection Means You Are Pushing Your Boundaries
📌 (0:21) Understanding and Managing Rejection
📌 (0:33) Professional Rejection Can Take Many Forms
📌 (0:55) Rejection Never Becomes Easy
📌 (1:02) Rejection Stings Because You Care
📌 (1:16) Rejection Can Be a Great Learning Opportunity
📌 (1:24) Useful Rejection Needs a Good Feedback Signal
📌 (1:39) Never Getting Rejected is a Useful Feedback Signal
📌 (1:55) Toxic Rejection is Not Helpful
📌 (2:14) Rejection for Hopeless Cases is Also Not Useful
📌 (2:25) Rejection Fables Aren’t Necessarily Helpful
📌 (2:49) Always Consider the Opportunity Cost
📌 (3:12) An Extremely High Rejection Rate is Not Healthy
📌 (3:23) Understanding Volatility is Key
📌 (3:35) Volatility is Most Impactful at Early Career Stages
📌 (3:46) Volatility Scenario: Repeated Applications
📌 (4:08) An Above Average Proposal Can Still Get Rejected
📌 (4:27) Strong Candidates Can Strike Out Three Times
📌 (4:50) Volatility is Somewhat Easier for Senior People
📌 (5:25) Early Success Can Be Brutal
📌 (5:48) Filtering Feedback From a Rejection is Messy
📌 (6:42) Better Managing Rejection
📌 (6:52) Increasing Your Numbers
📌 (7:30) Avoiding “Dead on Arrival” Applications
📌 (8:15) Recycling and Repurposing
📌 (8:48) Minimizing Loose Ends
📌 (9:08) Managing the Toll of Rejection
📌 (9:16) Quarantining Personal Time from Rejection News
📌 (9:31) Delaying Processing of Rejection
📌 (9:53) Bond With Others in the Same Boat
📌 (10:15) Rejection Can Get Easier, Somewhat
📌 (10:25) Experience Gives Perspective
📌 (10:50) Rejection Will Always Be There
📌 (11:01) Rejection Will Always Sting at Least a Little Bit
📌 (11:09) Make Sure You Celebrate Your Wins and Successes!

Full Video Notes

• Rejection is an Ever-Present Phenomenon: In your professional career rejection is an inevitability and ever-present part of life. It’s also a healthy indicator that you are pushing the boundaries of your capability in taking on challenges that are stretching your capabilities, which is a good thing. This video covers some key concepts around understanding and managing rejection, as well as the associated concept of volatility, or what many people would refer to as, “luck”. 
• Professional Rejection Takes Many Forms: You can rejected for a job application, a promotion application, an academic paper submission, a grant or fellowship proposal, a prize or award nomination, rejected for membership in a prestigious academy, and many more forms.
• Rejection Takes a Toll: Everytime you get rejected, it takes some sort of toll. There’s really no satisfactory way to completely remove this feedback signal: if you cared or valued enough to put yourself in the frame for whatever it was in the first place, then you feel it when you get rejected.
• Rejection is a Healthy and Learning Experience…to a Point: Failure and rejection are a part of life, and you can learn much in the process, even if it’s sometimes painful. But for this to be true, there needs to be some “signal” and feedback in the process: constructively critical reviews on a proposal or paper for example.
• Some Rejection is an Indicator You’re Pushing Appropriately: If you’re never getting rejected in your professional career, you’re not pushing your boundaries, and likely not maximizing your output.
• Toxicity-based Rejection Isn’t Helpful: If you’re getting rejected constantly because of rampant discrimination, a toxic work environment or some other negative factor, that’s not constructive or helpful, beyond perhaps telling you that you should consider getting yourself out of that environment if at all possible. Likewise, if you’re getting rejected because you’re applying for something that you’re clearly not even remotely competitive or suitable for and hence shouldn’t have applied for in the first instance, that’s also unhelpful.
• Many Unhelpful Fables Abound: One of the most common fables you’ll hear in motivational speeches is the person who persevered through years and years of rejections to eventually “make it”. On an individual level, this is always impressive and inspirational.
• Opportunity Cost: But a key concept to remember is the opportunity cost – that person, usually a passionate, motivated and hard working individual – could have done a lot of other things over those years and made contributions in other ways. Persevering through years of rejection always indicate personal character, courage and fortitude, but do not necessarily indicate that was the best use of that person’s time and energy. 
• Endless or Rampant Rejection is Not Sustainable:  while a little bit of rejection can be healthy and helpful as a development process, being in a situation where everything you do is rejected is not a healthy or sustainable situation to be in.
• Volatility is Vicious: a key concept that is often overlooked in discussions about rejection is the vital role of volatility, or what many people refer to as “luck”. Random variation is especially impactful early in your career. We can illustrate this with a simple but powerful example. 
• Repeated Grant Application Example: Let’s say you’re applying for a specific grant, which you can apply for once a year, with unlimited tries. The grant scheme has a 20% acceptance rate, but you have a great track record and proposal, and so your true chances of success are 30%. So you’re odds are 50% better than the average applicant. You apply for the first time, and you’re unsuccessful. You read the reviews, which are helpful, improve the application, the point where your real chances of success are 40%, double the average success rate. You apply a second time, and are unsuccessful. You then apply a third and final time. After those 3 years of trying, 1 in 4 applicants in your position will still have not been successful, despite submitting substantially better than average applications each year. This is the curse of volatility, and it especially sucks as an early career researcher.
• Volatility Evens Out Somewhat for Senior Researchers: a senior researcher may be putting in dozens of applications per year, so as long as they are reasonably capable, volatility is less of an issue, simply because of the numbers. It’s still a concern though, because they are responsible for the PhDs and early career researchers in their group, where volatility is still an issue.
• The Other Side of Volatility Can Also Be Vicious: through volatility, you can “get lucky” so to speak and get some amazing early wins – which is great. But it can be, somewhat perversely, particularly brutal when, after those early wins, you face a long period of rejection – in some ways this is even tougher to deal with because of the feeling that you’re going backwards.
• Feedback is Only Useful to a Point: if you get rejected and get feedback (not always a given), one of the most challenging skills to develop is how to interpret and filter that feedback. The two extremes: the reviewers are idiots, and everything the reviewer said is gospel truth – are not helpful, but it’s messy to go the middle route – but vital. Others can help you do this better by providing experienced additional perspectives.
• Some Partial Fixes: One way you can reduce the impact of volatility is by combining lead applications with supporting roles on other papers and applications – which gets your numbers up, and hence reduces volatility. At an early career stage this can help, but not completely, because many of the feedback mechanisms will primarily evaluate you on things you have initiated and led. At a later career stage, being a secondary contributor on lots of activities is less of an issue, career-wise.
• Avoid Dead on Arrival Applications: generally speaking you should only apply for opportunities where you have enough information to know that your application isn’t going to be “dead on arrival” so to speak and hence a guaranteed waste of time. Always check whether there are key criteria you don’t meet, whether official or unofficial.
• Recycling Reduces the Effect of Rejection: given you’ll spend much of your career being rejected, you can reduce the negative effects of that rejection by becoming hyper-efficient at recycling and repurposing things like grant proposals. Funding rules will preclude you submitting the exact same proposal to multiple schemes at once, but you can become efficient at rewriting and retweaking proposals upon rejection and rapidly resubmitting without a huge amount of effort. 
• Leaving Few Unleveraged Loose Ends: at any one point in time, an academic will have a bunch of rejeted proposals or unsuccessful initiatives. Successful individuals will make sure that things that are rejected almost always end up re-purposed in some other opportunity, sometimes many years later. Waste not, want not, so to speak.
• Managing Rejection: getting rejected can have a mental toll, whether it’s your first time or your hundredth. Simple measures can be effective. You can avoid checking outcomes whilst on holiday or spending time with your family or friends. If you’ve recently had a rejection outcome, rather than stew and overthink it whilst annoyed about it, you can deliberately “quarantine” it for a few days and not think about it until you’ve calmed down. You can commiserate with others who’ve also been rejected in the same funding scheme or conference paper submission round. Each of these simple measures can go a long way towards making rejection more manageable.  
• Rejection Does Get Somewhat Easier with Experience: An early career researcher can understandably get very stressed when they receive a rejection, because they feel that they have a limited number of opportunities to “make it” in order to craft themselves a viable career. Getting rejected does get somewhat easier as you get more experienced and senior, because you have accumulated more career evidence that this is a bump along the road and that, in due course, some things will be successful. You gain that quiet confidence that things will even out in the long run, which is harder to get at the beginning of your career.
• You Should Never Trivialize Rejection: the visceral reaction when you get rejected is valuable. It can motivate you try even harder, it can give you a clear signal that a career rethink is needed, and it can, somewhat perversely perhaps, remind you why you cared so much about the thing you submitted or applied for in the first place. 
• Rejection Will Always Be There: Excessive and continued rejection isn’t good for you, but as an unavoidable part of any career, some rejection can be a healthy stimulus for your own development journey, no matter how painful it is when that e-mail drops into your inbox, or you receive that phone call.

Celebrate the Wins: when you chalk up a win, it pays to celebrate it in a timely manner. Too often people let it slide and then the joy of its success is slowly eroded by all the bad news that follows it. So when you get a win, take a moment and celebrate it!