For me, my fear of rejection, low self-esteem and lack of self-confidence was ruining my life. On the surface, I appeared confident and outgoing. I came across as John Wayne the U.S. Marine on the outside, yet truthfully, on the inside, I was Pee Wee Herman. It was at this low point in my life, just before I was to be fired, that rich dad handed down some of his best words of wisdom for me. On the day I was put on probation by my sales manager at Xerox, rich dad said to me, “The most successful people in the world are the most rejected people in the world”.
“What?” I asked, not sure if I heard the right thing. “The most successful people in the world are the most rejected?”
“You heard me,” said rich dad. “And on the flip side, the people who are the least rejected are the least successful.”
“So if I want to be successful in life, I need to be rejected more and more,” I said. “You got it,” smiled rich dad.
“I don’t understand. Please explain.” I asked.
“Look at the President of the United States. Forty-nine percent of the voters – tens of millions of them – voted against him. They rejected him. Have you ever had millions of people reject you?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, when you do, you will be famous and successful.” “But he also had millions of people accept him,” I added.
“That is true,” said rich dad. “But could he ever have become President of the United States if he was afraid of rejection?”
“No, I guess not. I know there are many people who more than reject him. Many people hate him. He has to have guards around him because people want to kill him. I don’t think I could take that kind of pressure.”
“And that may be why you may not attain the kind of success you want or are capable of. The point is no one likes being rejected. Yet the lesson of the day is the people who run from rejection are the least successful people on the planet. That does not mean they are not nice people; it just means they are not as successful as people who are rejected a lot…people who do not run from rejection.”
“So if I want to become successful in life, I need to risk being more and more rejected?” I asked.
“That is correct,” said rich dad. “Look at the Pope. He is a great man and a great religious leader and yet he is greatly rejected. Millions of people do not like what he says or what he stands for.”
“That means rather than act like a wimp and let my sales manager fire me, I should go out and start getting rejected.”
“Well if you don’t start getting rejected, you definitely will get fired.” Rich dad smiled. “Look, don’t be a fool and run out into the world and splatter your face up against the walls of life. Yeas, you do need to risk being rejected, but you must also learn from your rejection, and that means correction.”
“Rejection and correction,” I said.
Nodding, rich dad wrote out the formula he learned from his sales training years before in Honolulu, the training for which he paid $200.
Rejection and Correction = Education and Acceleration
“I have followed this formula for years. Each time I am rejected, I ask myself, ‘What did I do wrong? What could I have done better?’ If I don’t come up with a good answer, I’d then talk to someone about the sales call, review what happened, maybe role-play, and repeat the situation where my friend is the buyer and I am the seller. The point is I don’t call the person who rejected me a ‘jerk,’ ‘bum,’ ‘cheap skate,’ or ‘loser.’ I suspend such nonsense and mentally thank the person for giving me an opportunity to learn, correct, and improve myself.’ I ask myself, ‘Next time, how could I have handled the situation differently and better.’”
“And that leads to your education and your acceleration in life,” I added. “In my opinion, it is the formula for success for anything in life,” said rich dad.
“But if I avoid rejection, the process does not begin?” I asked. “Rejection is the start of education.”
Nodding, rich dad smiled and said, “You’ve got it. That is why people who avoid rejection are, in the long run, less successful in life than those who face rejection. Most people are not successful because they have not been rejected enough.”
“The more I risk being rejected, the better my chances are of being accepted.”
“I got it,” I said with a mile to rich dad. A few days later, I volunteered to work for a non-profit charity dialing for dollars on their phone team. I wasn’t doing it for the money. I was doing it so I could help a worthy cause and to get rejected more. I realized that working for Xerox, my rejections per day were too few. By dialing for dollars at night, I could get the number of rejections up. I knew the more I was rejected, the more I could correct. The more I corrected, the more educated I became. And the more educated I became, the more successful I became. Three nights a week, after work at Xerox, I worked at the office of this charity. For a year, I dialled for dollars for three. In that year, I went from nearly being fired from Xerox to becoming their number-one salesperson for the next two years. Once I had achieved sales success at Xerox, I resigned and went full-time into my then part-time nylon and Velcro surfer wallet business. I was beginning my journey into the B quadrant. The lesson I learned was that the more I risk being rejected, the better my chances are of being accepted.