Rejection is for the successful, not failures
1 August 2025
Most of us are rejected. There’s no need for pity; it’s a braver path to growth.
Virtual hands up if you’ve come across the perfect person: that individual who’s solved the most difficult problems, glided up the tallest ladders, stuck to all the stringent rules - without seeming to break sweat. The archetypal ‘overachievement’ persona.
For the median worker (let’s call them the ‘mixed-bag-of-achievement’ persona), rejection - a term that’s often misconstrued as failure - is a natural part of working life.
There’s no comparable business role that faces rejection more than customer/client/sales-facing professionals. Cross-industry insights from tech giant, Salesforce, suggests 90-97.5% of the time salespeople miss before they hit. In other words, ~4.5 days of a 5 day working week could be spent chiselling through brick walls with a spatula. To learn about resilience, bouncebackability and perseverance, find your closest business developer.
Another group of rejection experts are project and change managers. Harvard Business School (and other researchers), find more than two thirds of change projects don’t deliver; that is, cost overruns, delays, luke-warm delivery. Translated: a project manager who’s managed 50 projects in their career may only have nailed it 15 times. Scope evolves, stuff changes, projects absorb the heat. If you want to start a start-up, shadow an experienced project manager from cradle-to-grave - they deal with more ebbs and flows than they are credited for.
The greatest spread of rejects are job hunters, and graduates are at the sharp end of this. Times Higher Education finds the average graduate applies to 16 jobs before landing one.
The list goes on: inventors, lawyers, marketeers, etc. All suffering the pain of repudiation in some shape or size.
Embracing rejection in leadership is a healthier route to dealing with economic ambiguity. It balances out ‘high-performance’ hyperbole. I’ve welcomed the ‘failure-purpose-train’ that’s engulfed business self-help. It gives misfits hope. But exercise caution: failure is not purpose; impact and contribution is. If you’re rejected or fail in the pursuit of purpose, don’t sweat, learn from it, move on, you’ll find impact. Newsflash: nobody is perfect. In fact, the most successful are usually the most flawed, if they choose to admit it. Those who carry the perfection persona only marginalise workforces. Constructively nudge them off their pedestal - tell them your rejection stories - they’ll be better leaders for it.
