I remember it well. Our assignment had been to write a speech about our greatest fear and read it aloud to the class. Student after student spoke, and after all the speeches were delivered, one thing was very evident in my mind: nearly everyone fears rejection.
I am no exception. I feared rejection just as much as the next person. Yet, this was a major problem for me. I was in one of the worst possible fields to have a fear of rejection. Why? Well, I was a writer.
I’ve loved writing ever since I was five years old and I have dreamed about being a published author for years. However, becoming published meant having to submit. And having to submit oftentimes meant being rejected.
Take my novel, for example. It’s a smallish piece of historical fiction that mixes romance with Greek myths with conspiracy theory. It took me over a year to both write and edit it, and then several more months to track down publishing companies that were accepting unsolicited authors (since I didn’t have an agent). It was a massive amount of work, and it translated into many sleepless nights since I am a full-time college student also. When the time to submit came, I wrote a seemingly unending amount of cover letters and sent them off. Then I waited. And I waited some more. Finally, after several more months, the letters came. One by one, they trickled in. And one by one, I was rejected again…and again…and again. Each time I ripped open a new letter, it felt as though my heart had been ripped open also. I had submitted to thirty publishing houses, and ultimately, I was rejected over thirty times.
Naturally, I became really discouraged and almost somewhat depressed, but my dad encouraged me to hang in there. It was later that month that, while I was checking my email, my gaze froze. I had a new message with the heading, “Contract Offer.”
I wanted to cry out or straight up cry. After six months of rejection, I was finally accepted. My novel, Labyrinth of Lies, was to be published! And as of December 2, 2013 it was released to the public. After fifteen years of dreaming, plotting, and writing, I am finally a real author.
Rejection is a part of life, but we can’t let it control us. If you have a goal, strive for it with all of your heart and don’t you dare hold back. Don’t stop just because you’re rejected. It’s true that we will probably fail a few times before we succeed, but we can’t let our fear of failure doom us to just that: failure. I feared rejection, but I learned something that helped. Fears are like shadows. Both are dark and both are scary, but neither can actually hurt us. They only have as much power as we grant them. Sometimes, the possibility of rejection isn’t a shadow. Sometimes, rather, it’s a very real possibility. Yet, through my own personal experience, I’ve found that the fear is more potent than the possibility of actually failing. Why? Because it’s just like a shot. Rejection only lasts for a moment, and then you move on. You pick yourself up and keep trying.
I learned something else too. I discovered the difference between goals and dreams. Dreams are good, but goals are better. Why? Because fairy godmothers are figments of fairytales and dreams don’t make themselves come true, but if we can set a goal and take steps toward reaching it, then maybe we’ll one day watch those goals become reality.
This said, we must reject rejection. Just how does one reject rejection? Sometimes we have to re-examine our motivations behind our actions. If our goal is to be accepted and well liked, it’s almost like giving someone else control over our lives. We can’t let other people rule our lives. We have to live them. And the only person who can reject your rejections is you.
So, if you have a dream stashed somewhere in your back pocket, turn it into a goal. Write it down, make a plan, and start working toward its completion. Unless you have some source of superhuman good luck, you will probably find yourself faced with many kinds of challenges, setbacks, and rejections, but you just have to work past it. People might think you are crazy—in fact, many of them probably will. However, they aren’t responsible for living your life. The responsibility for seeing your goal succeed or fail ultimately rests on you. So don’t lose heart and don’t give up, because someday, just maybe, if you keep at it long enough, the rejections will end.
Hannah Lokos is an author and a full-time college student (biology major). Her novel, Labyrinth of Lies, was released by Champagne Book Group on December 2, 2013, and is currently available on Amazon. You can connect with Hannah through Facebook, Twitter, or her website: www.hannahlokos.com.
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This is an inspiring story about not giving up in the face of failure. level devil – not a troll game
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Helpful read, especially the part about remember well. Thanks for putting it together.
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This was a useful read, especially the practical framing. It fits naturally beside related web resources like Elephtvapk.
The concrete examples make this easier to apply. Readers comparing related resources may also find ADHD Check useful in this context.
Your point about turning dreams into actionable goals really resonated with me. Writing is a tough journey, but persistence pays off. Just like sharpening your skills with a daily word ladder challenge, achieving success in any field requires consistent, incremental effort. Don’t let rejection stop your progress; keep iterating until you hit your target!
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Rejection is something every creator knows intimately, and Erin’s story really resonates with that long, uncertain wait. It’s a powerful reminder that persistence matters more than the fear itself. For those of us building in the digital space, that same principle applies—we keep refining our craft and putting our work out there. Speaking of creative persistence, I’ve been exploring how AI tools can help streamline the visual side of storytelling, turning written ideas into cinematic clips without the endless back-and-forth. It’s been a game-changer for prototyping concepts quickly. If you’re curious about blending traditional writing discipline with modern tech, check out what I’m experimenting with at minimax3.com. Keep rejecting the rejection, folks.
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The thirty rejections before landing a publisher hits different—that’s not motivational fluff, that’s the actual math of persistence. I appreciate how you distinguish between dreams and goals; the actionable part matters. The shadow metaphor works, though I’d add that sometimes rejection does sting for longer than a moment, and that’s okay too. I use this tool for project planning, and breaking big goals into measurable steps helps when the rejections start piling up. The real takeaway isn’t that rejection doesn’t hurt—it’s that you keep moving anyway.
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Rejection stings, but this piece reminds us that persistence beats fear almost every time. What stood out to me is how the author kept submitting despite thirty rejections — that takes real grit. It also made me think about how we handle feedback before submitting anything at all. Whether it’s a novel or an academic paper, going in blind is risky. I’ve started running my work through an AI checker first, just to catch anything that might raise flags before a journal or instructor does. It’s a small step, but it makes the submission process feel a lot less like gambling. aiturnitinchecker.com
The detail that got me was that you hunted down the houses still taking unsolicited submissions, because you had no agent. That is the part most people skip when they retell a story like this — thirty rejections is not thirty strokes of bad luck, it is thirty times you did the unglamorous legwork of finding a door that was actually open. Congratulations on Labyrinth of Lies, and a belated one.
One thing I would add to the goals-versus-dreams section, since that is where the piece gets a little soft: the mechanism that makes it survive is boring record-keeping. A log with the date sent, the house, and a follow-up date turns “waiting” into a queue that keeps moving, and it kills the worst habit in submitting, which is letting one pending response freeze every other query.
The other half is batching. Send in groups so no single envelope carries your whole sense of self, because the fear you describe is worst when one answer feels like the verdict. A rejection then reads as what it actually is: a fit problem on that desk, that week, with that list.
Your shadow line is the right one, but I would put it slightly differently — rejection is real, it just costs a moment, exactly as you wrote. The bill only gets large when you pay it in advance by not sending.
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What helped me most was shortening the gap between the rejection and the next attempt. Waiting until it stops stinging means losing weeks, and by then the momentum is gone. Sending the next one while the first is still uncomfortable turns out to be far easier than waiting to feel ready.
The useful reframe in this piece is that rejection is information about fit rather than a verdict on ability. Once that distinction is clear, the instinct to argue with the decision fades and it becomes much easier to ask what specifically did not match, which is the only part that can actually be improved.
The useful reframe in this piece is that rejection is information about fit rather than a verdict on ability. Once that distinction is clear, the instinct to argue with the decision fades and it becomes much easier to ask what specifically did not match, which is the only part that can actually be improved.
What helped me most was shortening the gap between the rejection and the next attempt. Waiting until it stops stinging means losing weeks, and by then the momentum is gone. Sending the next one while the first is still uncomfortable turns out to be far easier than waiting to feel ready.
It is worth separating the emotional response from the practical one. Feelings arrive on their own and there is not much to do about them, but the next action is a choice, and having a default next step written down in advance removes the need to decide anything on a bad day.
The point about other people’s indifference is the one that lands. Most rejections are not personal judgements delivered with care, they are quick decisions made by someone with too much to read. Treating them as a data point rather than a verdict is not denial, it is accuracy.
Something that helps is keeping a record of everything sent rather than only the outcomes. After a few months the pattern is obvious: the volume of attempts matters far more than the quality of any single one, and that is invisible if you only remember the failures.
One practical habit is to write the next-step plan before submitting anything. Deciding in advance what a no will trigger removes the paralysis afterwards, and it also tends to improve the pitch, because you stop writing to avoid rejection and start writing to be understood.
The framing of rejection as a cost of doing work at volume is the healthiest one I have found. A hundred no’s and one yes is a good year for most creative and professional projects, and the maths only looks brutal if the hundred are treated as a hundred separate wounds.
Worth adding that the response to feedback matters more than the feedback itself. Asking one specific question about why something did not land often produces more useful information than a long explanation would, and it leaves the door open for a later attempt.
The most useful thing I took from this is that rejection is usually faster to recover from when the next attempt already exists. Having something else already in progress means the no lands on a project rather than on the whole plan, and that difference is surprisingly large in practice.
There is a real skill in reading a rejection for the one sentence that matters. Most of the message is boilerplate, and the useful part is often a single clause about timing, format or audience, which is worth more than a long explanation would be.
I would add that comparing your rejection rate to someone else’s is almost never informative. Different fields, different volumes and different stages of a career produce completely different numbers, and treating them as comparable mostly produces unnecessary doubt.
The practical version of this advice is to schedule the follow-up before you send. A calendar reminder to try a different outlet in three weeks does more for resilience than any amount of encouragement, because it converts a decision into a default.
It also helps to keep the work moving in public. Sharing the process while things are still being turned down makes the eventual acceptance look like the continuation it is, rather than a sudden reversal that arrived from nowhere.
I found that the hardest part was not the no itself but the silence before it. Setting a personal rule about when to consider something dormant, rather than waiting indefinitely, removed a lot of low-level anxiety from the whole process.
The useful reframe in this piece is that rejection is information about fit rather than a verdict on ability. Once that distinction is clear, the instinct to argue with the decision fades and it becomes much easier to ask what specifically did not match, which is the only part that can actually be improved.
It is worth separating the emotional response from the practical one. Feelings arrive on their own and there is not much to do about them, but the next action is a choice, and having a default next step written down in advance removes the need to decide anything on a bad day.
Rejection stings most when a project has become tied to identity. Splitting the two apart, so that the work is something you do rather than something you are, makes it possible to revise it without feeling personally rewritten. That separation takes practice but it is learnable.
The framing of rejection as a cost of doing work at volume is the healthiest one I have found. A hundred no’s and one yes is a good year for most creative and professional projects, and the maths only looks brutal if the hundred are treated as a hundred separate wounds.
What I would add is that the audience changes what a rejection means. A no from a market you are not actually writing for is not a signal at all, and noticing which rejections came from the right kind of reader is more useful than counting the total.
The most useful thing I took from this is that rejection is usually faster to recover from when the next attempt already exists. Having something else already in progress means the no lands on a project rather than on the whole plan, and that difference is surprisingly large in practice.
There is a real skill in reading a rejection for the one sentence that matters. Most of the message is boilerplate, and the useful part is often a single clause about timing, format or audience, which is worth more than a long explanation would be.
I would add that comparing your rejection rate to someone else’s is almost never informative. Different fields, different volumes and different stages of a career produce completely different numbers, and treating them as comparable mostly produces unnecessary doubt.
Good reminder that rejection is information rather than a verdict. When I started publishing my own content I used laya AI for quick visuals, which made it much easier to stop overthinking the perfect look and just ship something.
Needed this today. I have been turning ideas into short videos with kling 4.0, and shipping something small every week has done more for my confidence than waiting for a big break.
I like the idea of treating rejection as information rather than a verdict. Having a clear next step makes it easier to keep moving, especially when the decision itself is uncertain; Jev AI is a useful free playground for turning structured state into probability-backed decisions: https://thejevai.com/.
Treating rejection as information rather than a verdict changes everything. I started keeping a simple log of every pitch and application that fell through, along with one lesson from each, and the sting faded fast once the entries started repeating. The reframing here matches what worked for me: the rejection was rarely about my worth and almost always about fit or timing. Thanks for the reminder that resilience is a practice, not a personality trait.
Rejection loses most of its sting once you stop treating it as a verdict on your worth and start treating it as data. Asking ‘what did this teach me’ turns a dead end into a redirect – I started keeping a ‘rejection log’ and the patterns it revealed were worth more than most of the advice I’d paid for. Great reminder that courage is a skill you practice, not a trait you are born with.
The reframe of rejection as redirection is simple but it sticks. What has helped me most is separating the decision from my self-worth: they rejected a proposal on a specific day with specific constraints, not me as a person. Collecting small wins right after a rejection also shortens the recovery window dramatically. Thanks for the actionable take on a topic most people only comfort-talk about.
Rejection stings mostly because we treat it as a verdict on our worth instead of feedback on a single attempt. What helps me is giving myself a short window to feel the disappointment, then asking one simple question: what is the next thing I can try? Momentum really is the best antidote – every new attempt makes the last no feel a little smaller. Thanks for the reminder that a rejection only defines us if we stop at it.
The detail about tracking down publishers that accept unsolicited authors without an agent really hit me, since that part of the process is rarely talked about. Thirty rejections over six months is a lot to push through while also being a full-time student. The “Contract Offer” email after all those letters must have felt surreal.
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The detail that you sent your novel to thirty publishers and got rejected over thirty times really stuck with me, especially after all that cover letter writing while in college. I’ve queried short stories before and the silence between responses was harder than the no itself. How did you keep from revising your manuscript every time another rejection arrived?
The distinction between a dream and a goal really resonated with me. Creative work often feels less intimidating when it is broken into small experiments instead of waiting for a perfect result. I like tools that support that iterative mindset; AI Kenerate lets creators turn text or reference media into video, image, music, and voice ideas while they are still exploring. AI Kenerate is one example.
The point about turning a dream into a goal is a strong one: steady work and a willingness to keep iterating can make setbacks less final. That same mindset applies to visual work too. Qwen Image Edit lets creators describe what should change and what must remain consistent while exploring background changes, object edits, text updates, outpainting, and style ideas. Qwen Image Edit
The distinction between a dream and a goal is useful because it turns a vague hope into a next action. I also liked the reminder to keep moving after a setback; small creative experiments make that mindset practical. Kenerate AI helps me turn an idea into an image or short video clip so I can keep iterating instead of waiting for a perfect first attempt.
Thanks for writing this up – useful detail.
Thanks for writing this up – useful detail.
The distinction between a dream and a goal is useful because it turns rejection into a next experiment rather than a final verdict. I especially liked the reminder that persistence can include changing the approach, asking better questions, and continuing to learn. For creative teams, Seedream 5.0 supports image generation and editing from prompts or reference images, which can make small visual iterations easier to test while a larger idea develops.
The reminder to turn rejection into a concrete next step really resonates. I also like how creative tools can make iteration easier: Instinct AI brings video, image, voice, and music workflows together so creators can keep experimenting instead of waiting for a perfect first attempt.
The distinction between a dream and a goal is especially useful for creative work. Turning a setback into a small, testable next step makes iteration feel much less final. For teams trying different hooks and formats, TryKlingAI can make those experiments easier by turning prompts, images, audio, and motion references into short video concepts. The key is still the habit you describe: keep learning from each attempt and keep the next one moving.
Rejection stings most when it feels personal, and your distinction between the event and its meaning is genuinely useful. I kept thinking about this practical guide while reading the section on reframing, because it echoes the same idea of separating signal from noise.
The advice to let rejection sit for a day before responding goes against every instinct, which is probably why it works. Your examples from creative fields make the abstract idea concrete, and the Bad Times AI perspective on processing setbacks fits right in with that theme.
What stood out is how you separate rejection of the work from rejection of the person. That single reframe changes the whole emotional equation. Reading about Ausar AI recently gave me a similar lesson in treating feedback as data rather than verdict.
I appreciate the reminder that rejection lasts only a moment and that a dream becomes more actionable when you turn it into goals and steps. The article also got me thinking about how stories let us explore different paths after a setback; Project Moonlife is a free browser-based urban life simulator where choices shape a character’s story. Thanks for sharing such an encouraging account of persistence.
I appreciated the reminder to turn a dream into a concrete goal with a plan. Rejection feels less final when each attempt becomes information for the next step. That same idea is easy to see in a choice-driven life simulation: small decisions add up to a path, and you can explore how that path unfolds in 1in8b life.
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The distinction between a dream and a goal is the part that stayed with me: turning a hope into a written plan makes the next step much easier to see. The reminder that rejection is temporary also gives the story a practical, encouraging tone. For teams that want to turn complex ideas into clear visual stories, Explainer Video can help structure the message.