An irony of my life is that I work in marketing but have a hard time marketing my own work. Self-promotion has never come easily to me.
When I publish a piece on this Substack, the most I will do is tweet about it. I don’t post on multiple social channels. I don’t have a list of Facebook groups and Slack communities where I share my content and encourage people to “amplify it.” I don’t enjoy trumpeting my work because I feel like, well, I just said it. Why do I have to then talk about what I just said? It screams “Hey, pay attention to me.” And this makes me uncomfortable.
That’s not to say I’m philosophically against self-marketing. Some of the people I most admire do it really well. One way to justify it is you’re sharing something useful that could benefit others. Why wouldn’t you spread the word? A more cynical view: the underlying motivation is self-serving, e.g., gaining more followers, selling more books, getting a promotion. It’s really hard to separate the two. When you do something that benefits others and tell them about it, you’re probably going to receive recognition and feel pretty good about yourself. I don’t think there’s anything shameful in this.
The deeper reason self-marketing can feel uncomfortable is that when you tell the world that what you’ve done is important and worth paying attention to, you’ve set yourself up for the possibility that the world could disagree and ignore you.
“Does anyone want to give a lightning talk?”
When my friend Steve asked this question on our last hygge hike, there was total silence, but it wasn’t because no one had anything interesting to talk about. Everyone was in the midst of saying something interesting to the person next to them, but when offered the podium, all the side conversations died. This is because giving a talk means acknowledging to the group that you think what you have to say is important. This is vulnerable. What if they judge you? What if you bore them? You’re opening yourself up to a reception that might not be what you hoped for. When you market your work and get only a handful of likes, it can feel like only five people showing up to your lightning talk.
Jia Jiang of rejectiontherapy.com set a goal for himself to experience rejection every day for 100 days (he explains why in his TedTalk). I love that he turns his bogeyman into a fun social experiment, but some of the tasks he came up with are so ridiculous and no more high-stakes than a dare (Day 2: Request a “burger refill”).
To experience true rejection you need to:
Be deeply invested in the outcome
Believe there’s a decent possibility you’ll get what you want
The more you want something, the closer you are to obtaining it, the harder it is to handle rejection.
On his website, Jiang states, “My goal was to desensitize myself from the pain of rejection and overcome my fear.” I actually think the goal should be to embrace the pain of rejection. Some of the best things in life can lead to savage disappointment: when you’ve been dating someone you really like, but it doesn’t work out; when you’ve spent years working on a startup or a novel, and it goes nowhere. If you’re doing something that truly matters to you, it’s impossible not to feel the pain of rejection.
Experiencing rejection with the first novel I pitched made me anticipate it more. Far from being desensitized, I actually fear it more now because I know how soul-crushing it feels to work on something you care so deeply about for three years and never have it see the light of day, and I’ve invested so much more time and energy since my first failed attempt. But this fear is also what compels me to take my current project seriously, to give it the earnest effort it merits, rather than plunging in with blind hope.
A big takeaway from Jiang’s experiment is that sometimes the most surprising outcomes require you to accept rejection as part of the process. If you put yourself out there, knowing there’s a chance you won’t get what you want, that the result might be annihilating, you’re also setting yourself up to be pleasantly surprised.
When we experience rejection, it’s natural to think “game over,” to run away and hide. Some people never try again. Others, after tending to their wounds, become curious about their experience. They start to interrogate what happened and why, what they can do differently next time. They see the bigger picture and move the goal post: it’s not about being in a relationship with this particular person but about building the most authentic relationship with themselves. It’s not about getting this book published but about becoming a better writer. Far from “game over,” rejection can be a detour to something much greater than what we originally set our sights on. But first, we must embrace the pain.
Your writing resonates with my life lately. As someone who believes they have overall experienced & embraced rejection over and over again I have developed some of my own framing which parallels yours.
One big thing that helped me grow was letting go of my expectations about the outcomes and instead focusing on the process and qualities of the moment to moment experience. I have felt this through relationships, doing my PhD, or while doing a startup. I think by embracing failure, rejection or other "negative" outcomes as an inherent part of existence it frees you in a lot of ways. You are unlikely to escape that kind of suffering.
To borrow your experience of writing a novel, we set ourselves up for much of the suffering with expectations like great writers got there by never writing a bad novel, or to find great love without failing once or many times. For me trying to build a business the last few years has been nearly weekly lessons in facing rejection or failure in many forms. The people who reach those often lauded outcomes are those who move through those experiences to the other side. Often because people don't share vulnerably or honestly about the challenges growing up many of us never got to really see how the sausage is made and the rejection becomes not only the momentarily failure but a judgement on our goodness or value.