"Failure is not something to be ashamed of, it's something to be POWERED by. Failure is the highest octane fuel your life can run on. You gotta learn to make failure your fuel.” -Abby Wambach
Why do I love Chabad?
Oh, I could pick so many reasons (and I’ve written about many.)
But I had to pick one, it’s that Chabad rabbis don’t fear rejection.1
If you’ve ever seen a group of Chabad shlichim on a street corner asking people to lay tefillin or shake a lulav, I’ll bet that only a minimal number of passersby say yes. I guess that most people go out of their way to avoid even talking to them.
But from where I sit, the total number of yesses is immaterial; what matters is the number of people they ask.
I still hold a Pollyannaish belief: any Jewish organization can thrive more today than it did yesterday, regardless of its sector or circumstances. But the real difference between those that flourish and those that merely survive lies in a community’s willingness to be ambitious and embrace rejection:
You can raise enough money…
You can grow your school or camp…
You can expand your spiritual community…
If you are willing to hear the word “no.”
A lot.
Is that naïve?
Maybe.
However, fear of rejection shapes our reality far more than we admit, which brings us to this week’s big idea.
Rejection Goals
Do you consider yourself goal-oriented?
Do you hate rejection?
If so, welcome to the club!
I doubt anyone likes rejection—why would they? However, the truth is that success in anything requires persistence, and persistence means facing rejection. That’s where the real problem lies: fear of rejection keeps many people from even trying to move forward. Yet without the willingness to risk rejection, success is impossible. This brings us to this week’s big idea: rejection goals.
Jillian Anthony coined the term “Rejection Goals” in her newsletter, Cruel Summer Book Club, writing that fear is “the biggest factor holding myself back from what I most want.”2 As a writer, her success depends on submitting work repeatedly; yet, her fear of rejection led her to take fewer chances. So, she flipped the script. Anthony created a group that would hold each other accountable not for successes, but for racking up rejections. She called it the “November of NO.”
Here’s the cool part:
In a Vox article connecting rejection goals to professional growth, Anthony explains that while she aimed for 12 rejections in a month, she ended up with seven rejections and three new editorial assignments. By shifting her focus from success to rejection, all of a sudden, “getting a no…was worth celebrating.”3 The more chances she took, the more success she found.
While Anthony’s concept of rejection is not peer-reviewed research (nor does she claim it to be), she also notes that psychiatrists are starting to recognize how lowering “rejection sensitivity” plays a role in improving long-term relationships and self-esteem. A 2018 paper notes that fear of rejection plays a positive role in human development, early rejection experiences shape future social interactions, and that when our defenses are triggered too easily—even by vague signs of rejection—this sensitivity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that stunts growth.4
So, if there’s a cause or idea that keeps you up at night—something you believe could transform Jewish life—the difference between it taking off or stalling may be your tolerance for rejection. In the end, you must decide: Do you want to live in the land of the safe or the land of the brave?
Perhaps if we start valuing the number of shots we take more than the number of shots that go in, we will see results from organizations that have the potential to thrive, but whose success feels elusive. Because those willing to endure strategic rejection are the ones we eventually celebrate.
Moral Ambition
Maybe I’m aiming too small…
Jewish organizational life is not merely about finding more donors, campers, members, and so on; those are means to an end. And if you want to think about how to think about the power of rejection goals on a much grander scale, consider reading Rutger Bregman’s new book, Moral Ambition.
Bregman is a historian who first gained fame by attending a gathering of super-wealthy individuals and suggesting that the most effective way for them to combat poverty was to…wait for it…pay higher taxes.5
(I know…shocking!)
Bregman is a bit of an iconoclast, and I love his writing.
Moral Ambition is Bregman’s attempt to challenge everyone to find “the will to make the world a wildly better place.”6 In particular, Bregman aims at a variety of jobs that, in his mind, are wildly overcompensated, provide no societal good, and could all “go on strike and the world would be just fine.”7 Would the world notice if, tomorrow, no one made a living as a professional social media influencer? You get the idea.
Bregman aims to attack our lack of moral ambition at both ends of the political spectrum. And since this newsletter is for Jewish leaders, I’m pretty confident that most of you are doing what you do because of your moral ambition. So far, so good. But when it comes to our work, this passage from Bregman gave me pause:
“Effective idealists…may be pie-in-the-sky when it comes to their goals, but they’re pragmatic in making them happen. If they need to hobnob with wealthy types to raise money for a good cause, then hobnob they will. If they must forge tough compromises in order to forge ahead, that’s what they’ll do. If their carefully cultivated curly mustache threatens to compromise their credibility, they’re the first to grab the clippers.”8
This is where rejection goals meet moral ambition. In the Jewish community, we spend too much time talking, throwing around phrases like “we need to re-vision” or “now is the time to prioritize X.” These sound good in thought pieces but offer little on-the-ground value. Worse, they distract from the people who do the hard work of bringing bold ideas to life.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about survivorship bias and how we often draw the wrong lessons from successful Jewish startups.9 If there’s one thing worth emulating, it’s not the branding—it’s the grueling, painstaking, unglamorous work their leaders put in to turn vision into reality.
The leaders I admire have nerves of steel.
They put in the hours, make the tough calls, and ask donor after donor to move the mission forward. Do they always succeed?10 No. But I’d rather celebrate the person who makes 1,000 phone calls than the one with a slick website and a clever tagline who leaves no real impact.
Spend enough time putting yourself out there and enduring rejections, and who knows? You may one day be the person we all celebrate…
…and then ask how you “magically” did it.
Don’t Waste Your Life
$10.1 Million
The amount the original Birkin Bag sold for at auction.
What I Read This Week
Spaced Out Competition- Can You Handle It?: In South Korea, there is a competition to see how long a person can go while doing nothing. Had I participated, my over/under is about 5 seconds. As Linda Richman once taught, I have shpilkes in the genechtagazoink.11
The English Paper’s Demise: I love using Chat GPT to correct my grammar,12 but I would never use it to write something from scratch. It turns out that I am increasingly in the minority, and Hua Hsu explores in this piece what that means for the future of writing.
Pros and Cons of Charismatic Leadership: Maybe I’m the first person to use this as a verb, but it drives me crazy when leaders try to “charisma” their way through life. However, charismatic leadership has both pluses and minuses, as explored in this excellent piece.
Why Texas Hill Country Floods: As a lifelong camp person, my heart is broken for the families impacted by the floods that tore apart Camp Mystic. This is a helpful piece in The Conversation that helps understand why this area of Texas is so susceptible to flash floods.
Tether Became A Money Launderer's Dream: One of the biggest criticisms of cryptocurrency is that people cannot use a digital coin to buy anything. Well, it turns out that cryptocurrency’s best use is for crime and money laundering (which is another reason we should be skeptical).
The first time I wrote about this in eJP, a Chabad Rabbi wrote a response, stating that I had missed the most key reason for their success:
Chabad provides authentic shmura matzah.
While I don’t want to yuck someone’s yum, I still think my answer is plausible.
To each his own…
Or at least stop engaging in tax avoidance…
Either way, it did not go well.
Ibid., 5-6.
Ibid., 63-64.
Ideas Don’t Have Feelings
“Until the lion learns to hunt, every story will glorify the hunter.” -African Proverb
Ironically, they also know when to quit…
Oh no…I’m getting verklempt.
Talk amongst yourselves…
In full disclosure, I never use ChatGPT to tell me what to write, or write something in scratch for me. But sometimes, there is a sentence that doesn’t quite sound right, and it always gives me helpful alternatives.