Jiang - Rejection proof: how I beat fear and became invincible through 100 days of rejection

Y oure probably wondering why I was standing at this mans front door and what I meant by special project. Was this a new sales strategy I was practicing? A dare? A social experiment? Actually, it was a little bit of each. It was part of a one-hundred-day journey to overcome my fear of rejectiona journey that gave me a new perspective on business and humanity, and gave me tools to be better at almost everything. By challenging myself to seek out rejection again and again, I came to see rejectionand even the world around mevery differently. It changed my lifeand I hope that by reading about my journey, it might change yours as well.

But before I tell you what happened next, maybe I should go back a bitback to the start.

It was July 4, 2012, just after sunset. Thousands of people were gathered at our local community park, waiting for the Independence Day fireworks to start. My wife, Tracy, sat next to me on our blanket, rubbing her belly. She was eight months pregnant with our first child. All around us, kids were running with Frisbees and ice cream cones, families were unpacking picnic baskets, beer bottles clinked, and laughter filled the air. Everyone seemed so happy, so filled with summertime joy.

Everyone but me.

In many ways, I was living the American dream. At just thirty years old, I had a secure six-figure job at a Fortune 500 company. Tracy and I owned a 3,700-square-foot house with a pond view. We even had a golden retriever named Jumbothe quintessential suburban American dogand now we were weeks away from the birth of our son. Best of all, my wife and I had an incredible relationship, and not a day went by that I didnt realize how lucky I was to be loved by such an amazing woman. In other words, I should have been overjoyed with my circumstances. But the truth was, I was as depressed as I could be. My misery wasnt personal, thoughit was professional.

I grew up in Beijing, China, at a time when every schoolage child was taught to be a model worker and a building block for the growth of the nation. But being a model workerin China or anywherehad never been my dream. Instead, ever since I was little, I had fantasized about being an entrepreneur. While other kids played sports or video games, I devoured the biographies of Thomas Edison and Panasonic founder Konosuke Matsushita, looking for clues about how to become a great innovator. When I was fourteen, Bill Gates visited Beijing, his first-ever trip to my hometown. And I became obsessed with his story of founding Microsoft. I tore down all the sports memorabilia I had on my bedroom walls and made my fantasy about entrepreneurship a life goal. I vowed to become the next Bill Gates and invent an amazing technology product that would take the world by storm. I pestered my family into buying me a brand-new top-of-the-line computer and started teaching myself how to write programming code. I even wrote a letter to them (which I still have) promising that my company would be so successful that I would buy Microsoft by the time I was twenty-five. Drawn in by flashy Hollywood depictions of America and the fact that Bill Gates lived there, I also believed I would one day move to the United States to fulfill that destiny.