Choose Yourself! (25 page)

All of them had one thing in common. While pursuing the career of their dreams they had all been rejected. Some of them hundreds of times. All of them were either on the verge of writing full-time for a living or had already made the leap. Every one of them was smiling.

How many would’ve been smiling if they had given up after the thirty-ninth rejection and didn’t go for that fortieth? Or didn’t go for it that moment when they decided, I’m going to take control of the creative process and not stop where the gatekeepers tell me to stop.

SO MANY TIMES I’VE BEEN STOPPED BY THE GATEKEEPERS.
At a job, for instance, where my boss said, “Stop working on this and focus on your main job.” Or when I was trying to sell a TV show and there were only one or two decision makers and they all blocked my path for political reasons. Or I wanted to sell a company and there were only a few decision makers who could make or break what I thought then was my entire life. The stark fear I had whenever I spoke to them, knowing they had this enormous power over me, and foolishly thinking that I had nothing to offer them.

Every day, in all aspects of our lives, we are rejected. Rejection is probably the most powerful force in our lives. Think back on the times you’ve been rejected and how your response to it changed your life completely. There are three basic responses to rejection that I’ve seen (in just the past few days I’ve seen examples of all of these).

“I suck. I can’t do this. I give up.”

“They are stupid. I’m going to keep pushing forward.”

“Hmm, what can I do differently? What can I learn from this rejection?”

Obviously I’m going to ignore the first two. It could be the case that you need to give up. Or it could be the case that you should do nothing to improve and you just push forward, but that should never be the gut response (although, again, I’ve seen it as the gut response several times from various people in just the past few days/months/years/myself/etc.).

So how can you take rejection and use it to push forward?

IMPROVE.
You wanted that ONE job, that ONE scholarship, that TV show, that book, to sell your company, to sell your product, whatever. And they said, no. Take a hard look at the product. Can you improve your offering? Can you take a step back and improve what you are doing? Maybe you can and maybe you can’t. But brainstorm first. What are the ten things you can do to improve what you are doing?

One time I tried to sell a company that I had started. The company didn’t have enough clients or enough revenues. And I was a bit inconsistent about the services we were offering that made us unique. There were about ten different areas I needed to improve and gradually I improved them all and sold the company a year later.

EXPAND THE UNIVERSE OF DECISION MAKERS.
Until the past two or three years, if you wanted to sell a novel there were basically five to ten decision makers. Every year almost twenty thousand people would submit novels to these decision makers (the major publishing houses) and most would get rejected. Who would reject you? Interns and assistants who had just graduated college with a degree in comparative literature, who barely even looked at what you wrote.

Now you can self-publish via Amazon (or through this book’s publisher, Lioncrest), and it’s a great process. You just chose yourself but, more important, the readers become your decision makers. The universe of millions of readers will now help you make your next decisions on how to improve, how to gain more power over your creative process, and finally, how to secure power over your entire life.

THIS IS THE CHOOSE YOURSELF ERA.
When I was visiting with Amazon, I was amazed at what a revolution was going on. It’s not about an extra device. It’s about how for the first time since Gutenberg there’s an actual revolution in how you can communicate with the masses. In every way, you can choose yourself now to succeed, to improve, to communicate, to extend your reach to the individuals who need your message. Don’t give up on this opportunity. In fact, “rejection” might be what forces you into it, as it did for the twenty or so authors I met last week.

And it’s not just novels. It’s everything. Can you widen the audience for your product? Online dating has expanded the decision makers in your relationship life. And YouTube has greatly expanded the universe of tastemakers who will define your fate. I hate to say it, but Justin Bieber uploading YouTube videos of himself (and now exceeding 2 billion video views) greatly increased his chances of success instead of trying to go the same route as everyone else—through the traditional five to ten record labels deciding your fate. All respect to the kid, who chose himself and made it work.

IMPROVE YOUR APPROACH.
You keep getting rejected in bars? Find a different place, where the odds aren’t stacked against you. Nobody responding to your networking e-mails for “Ten minutes of your time please?” Then offer something. Give something for free so people immediately see value in your approach immediately. You keep cold-calling customers and they hang up? Find a different way to get distribution.

CHANGE UP, DON’T GIVE UP.
I was the guy who “gave up” on the thirty-ninth try when trying to sell a novel I had written. Sometimes the odds are just too stacked against you. Maybe it would’ve worked on the fortieth try. I don’t know. But I’m glad I gave up; I “changed up” instead. Rather than focusing on fiction as the only creative medium, I started looking at both TV and the brand-new World Wide Web as creative media. Which led to a job at HBO. Which led to my first company focusing on building content-heavy websites for entertainment companies.

I didn’t give up on being creative. I expanded the power of my creativity by not limiting myself to one domain, and vowing to return to book-writing later, ultimately to fiction-writing. Maybe I’ll do it, maybe I won’t. But the “Change Up” certainly released me creatively, and I was able to use it to build both my financial life and creative life. We’ll see if it ever comes full circle.

IMPROVE YOUR AUTHENTICITY.
Social media can also be called “Individual media” as opposed to “Group Media.” Instead of a large group broadcasting your effort, you can build up your own presence by establishing your Facebook platform, your Twitter presence, your LinkedIn, Quora, Pinterest, blogging, Amazon, SlideShare, Scribd, reddit, etc., presence. All of these channels are used to create authenticity for your offering. Each follower, fan, etc., you are personally able to sway over to your side of the world continues to establish your authenticity, regardless of who is “rejecting” you. This is how you choose yourself and build your own platform rather than relying on the whims of a meager few.

ASK FOR ADVICE.
Someone rejected you? Poor baby! Now, after your mourning is over, ask why. You’re going to be rejected all your life. In every way. It never hurts to understand why. Sometimes they will even tell you and, in those cases, it’s a guarantee that you will remember.

DANCE WITH FAILURE.
You just got rejected? How did you deal with it? Did you cry? Did you give up? Did you think to yourself, Why do I ALWAYS fail? Did you think to yourself, Those guys are STUPID for rejecting me? Understand your reaction to failure. What can you do to improve it?

The other day I read that 76 percent of the universe is comprised of “dark energy.” In other words, we have zero clues as to what it is. Another 20 percent is “dark matter,” i.e., matter that we have no clue about. Only 4 percent of the universe is actually made up of matter we understand. In other words, after Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg, and two thousand years of collective exploration of the universe and all its elements, we’ve basically failed. In fact, the more knowledge we get, the more we realize how badly we are failing. We used to think we had it down. But now even the Big Bang theory is in serious question. We just suck at understanding the world around us.

Do physicists cry themselves to sleep every night because they have failed so badly? Of course not. This failure has only given them opportunity to discover more. It’s opened up vast landscapes of potential understanding that can actually help us understand what the universe is, and in that understanding, help us understand who we are.

Not every failure is an opportunity. But figure it out. Look at the times you failed. How many, in retrospect, were opportunities. About two years ago, I had a billionaire who wanted to give me about $50 million to start a fund. A mutual friend of ours blocked it for some reason I still don’t know. At the time I was upset.

Now I’m grateful. I’ve done so many things since then that I’m very happy I did and I never would’ve done if I was busy running a fund. Thank god I got rejected! I never would’ve written this book, for instance.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THE PROCESS:
The NORMAL thing is to be rejected. To get rejected by jobs, your kids, friends, family members, relationships, businesses, publishers, everyone. As Dashama put it in her e-mail to me (see “The Curious Case of the Sexy Image”): a third will like you, a third will hate you, a third won’t care…no matter what you do.

It’s actually ABNORMAL to “get close” to not being rejected. It’s even more abnormal to be “accepted” or to “succeed” in some conventional sense. So acknowledge that it’s perfectly normal to feel rejected over something. And it’s perfectly normal to fear it for the future. In fact, to do otherwise would be to reject reality.

But also acknowledge the successes. The things that occur that are abnormal. The things you do to improve. The things you learn on the road to choosing yourself.

Don’t fall back into a story (“I always get rejected”) that is more fairy tale than reality.

STAY IN TOUCH.
It’s hard for me to not burn bridges. I tend to do it too much. But I’ve found great success when I’ve not fallen into the bridge-burning pattern I often succumb to.

Example: I once tried to sell an early company I started to Omnicom, the big ad agency. I met with the woman who made these decisions for Omnicom. She felt we weren’t ready yet.

Every month I sent her an update: new clients, new sales numbers, number of employees. I also offered to help any of the agencies that Omnicom had. One time I called her on behalf of one of my clients to see if she could recommend any agencies within the Omnicom family to help one of my clients. In other words, I offered her real value.

After about a year of me doing this every month, she rallied three of the agencies within Omnicom to come over and check out my company. All three made offers. Did I accept any? No, but I was able to leverage those offers into a better offer from someone who came completely out of the blue.

I hate the phrase
Life is too short
. Sometimes it feels very long to me. But it’s certainly too short to spend any time on hard feelings. Everyone is just trying to get by. Both the rejected and the rejecters. Nobody is free from this. So let’s all keep in touch. It’ll be a tiny bit easier to make it to the finish line.

SURVIVING FAILURE

Perhaps the best thing that happened to me in 2012 was I said no to being run over by a tank in Santiago, Chile. “You won’t get hurt,” said Mattias, “trust me, there’s enough space underneath the tank.” The invitation was at the request of the president of Chile, who earlier that year had put out a press release saying his net worth had increased by $200 million since he had become president. This was capitalism at work, and he had invited me down to be an eyewitness to it.

Someone wrote me that they were very upset because a deal they had been working on all year had not worked out. “How do you get past this?” he asked. Many times I get asked that. “How do I get past this bad thing that happened to me?” A relationship, a deal, an illness, an insult. And I deal with this question myself. Lots of bad things happen.

“How do you get past this?” Diversification is everything. You get past “this” by having lots of “that”s.

But on top of everything there’s one more thing.
Being like a child.
Fittingly, I am finishing this book on the last night of 2012. Last night my daughter woke me up and she was crying. “I forgot to do my homework today!” she said. “That’s okay, honey, we’ll do it tomorrow.” “But then New Year’s Eve Day is ruined,” she said. “It’s a holiday!” “Okay, we’ll do it the next day,” I told her, trying to calm her down so I could get back to sleep. “But New Year’s Day is a holiday!” and she was crying and I had run out of days.

Like we all will at some point. We’ll run out of days. And a child will cry and miss us. And eventually another child will cry and miss them when they are all grown up and the life is withered out of them.

Diversification is one thing, but a child forgets. January 2 will happen and my daughter won’t care what day it was that she got her homework done. January 3 will happen and my daughter won’t even remember if she had homework this past weekend, and January 4 will happen and my daughter won’t even remember any of the things she learned in her homework. January 5 will happen, though, and I’ll still remember all the bad things that happened to me personally in 2012. Forget about failing at just one deal.
In 2012 I had:

• Three funds I tried to start and couldn’t get off the ground.
  
• I tried to get someone to buy $1 billion worth of FB stock (before it went public) and failed
  
• I tried to get someone to sell $300,000 worth of Twitter stock and failed
  
• I tried to get a $1 billion dollar JV on an oil deal done
  
• I tried to buy 1 million barrels of oil for someone and failed
  
• three companies I invested in, I had to write off as zeros
  
• I’m waiting to hear today if a company I invested in gets funding or if they will depend on me to avoid going broke by the end of today.
  
• I sold a house I never lived in, and lost $800,000 on it. Just glad to get rid of it now.
  
• My oldest became a teenager (which turns out to be a much bigger loss for me than I realized it would be. I will never have those years back.).
  
• My mother accused me of killing my father and will no longer speak to me.
  
• Both my sisters no longer speak to me.
  
• I get nonstop hate mail. I got one today saying I was “too Jewish,” whatever that means. And over the weekend I got one from a Jewish guy saying I was a disgrace to Jews. So I don’t win either way.
  
• I got results back from testing my DNA. I have double the risk of everyone else of getting Alzheimer’s. Ditto for Parkinson’s. I told a friend I was going to write
  The APo4E Diet
  (Apo4e being the gene or chromosome or whatever for Alzheimer’s). She wrote back it would be a bestseller because everyone would forget if they had bought it already.