Hello, hello. The topic today is how to think about rejection. We all have periods in our lives when we feel more liked and the world is more interested in what we do. We also have periods in our lives where we feel more rejected. The world is not that interested, in that moment, in what we have to say and what we have to offer. It can happen in our personal life; it can happen in our professional life. A good example is being invited to give talks. Sometimes their periods when we get more invitiations, sometimes there are less. It doesn’t have to be about giving talks. That is just one example. Like everybody I’ve experienced periods of ups and downs.
Of course, when things are going well, life is very easy. The question is how do we explain when things are not going well to ourselves? My current framing of that has been helping me a lot for a long time and it’s useful. So maybe it will be useful for you as well.
There’s a story of a fisherman who is setting his traps and nets and he’s working very busily. Suddenly he sees a big boat coming in his way. He has no time to put everything back on his little fishing boat. The big boat will destroy and ruin everything. He waves to the big boat and he says, “Hey, hey, stop, I’m trying to fish! Don’t come this way.” The boat keeps coming towards him. And he starts to take his things out of the water but he has no time. He waves his hands again and he says, “Please stop, stop, don’t come this way. You’re destroying all my labor, all my effort, all my fishing nets, all my traps.” In the end, he sees that there’s no chance. There’s no way he could save anything. So he drops everything and just moves out of the way to save his life, knowing that many of the traps and the nets will be lost. When the boat passes by him and he looks carefully and he sees there’s nobody on the boat.
Now what is the metaphor? A lot of time we think that that somebody out there has a negative intention toward us, that somebody is not interested in us, wants to hurt us, or somebody has an intention. The boat is coming at us. But the reality is that most likely there’s nobody on the boat. There’s nobody who cares about us one way or another. The world is just acting the way the world acts. Things come in and out of favor. I first thought about this metaphor, when a conference eventually decided not to extend and invitation to me many years ago. Whe I thought about it, I realized, I was probably number 25 on their list to begin with. And number 24’s calendar cleared up.
We tend to interpret lots of things as if they are directed at us. But the fact is most people in the world just don’t care about us. It’s nothing to do with us. They just go on their way. If we happen to be good candidates for them in some way, they pick us. If not, they don’t. So, whenever we feel rejected, it usually has nothing to do with us. The world is just not that interested in us. It’s just doing its own thing. And we just happen to be along its way. Sometimes we feel that somebody cares about us, but often it’s not the case. Anyway, that’s the story I keep coming back to. When I feel that the world is not supportive, I remember that people just don’t really care that much. I hope this helps you, too.
