For me, the trick to handling rejection is to see if for what it is – the most likely result of “trying.” From 1984 to 1990, I auditioned for at least 500 jobs. I booked less than a dozen. That’s one “yes” for every fifty “no’s.” In 1993, after losing my steady job at QVC, (deservedly,) I returned to the freelance life. For the next eight years, I lived in New York and Hollywood, and auditioned for no less than two thousand gigs. I booked roughly three-hundred of those. In other words, I did very well. But along the way, I was rejected two or three times a week. That’s every week, for the better part of a decade. That’s a lot of rejection.
I’m not gonna tell you I never let it bother me. Unless you’re a robot or a psychopath, it’s very hard to not take a personal rejection personally. The hardest one for me to accept is explained in this letter, which I received 17 years ago from a very decent Executive Producer at The Daily Show. It’s one of the nicest rejection letters I’ve ever received, but it was nevertheless devastating, because I knew then with certainty that this was my “dream job.”
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