The only species out of work are human beings

It’s easy to get discouraged when we get so many rejections. 

Each time we hear no, it chips away another chunk of our confidence, making us feel just a little more insecure than the time before. 

And so, because rejection can take such an emotional toll us on, it’s our responsibility to restore the balance. To double down on rebuilding our spirits and buoying our faith during threatening times. 

Without such compensatory effort, we will allow other people to be responsible for giving us doubts about our sanity. We will allow the world to back us into an old definition of ourselves that no longer holds true. And we will wind up living as weakened versions of ourselves. 

Throughout various job and career transitions in my work life, rejection has become a necessary function within my professional mainframe. I have accepted it as the cost of doing business. 

But I have also refused to allow it to embed itself so deeply in my psyche that it becomes impossible to move forward. Because at the end of the day, no matter how glamorous or interesting or well paying the gig is, it’s still just a job. It’s just a job. Work is but one spoke on the wheel of a life. There are other things that are important too. 

Take it from a recovering workaholic, it’s better to commit career suicide than to die of suicide by career. 

Turkel, the historian and broadcaster, famously wrote that the only species out of work were human beings. And the very fact that our species has invented unemployment ought to give us pause. Unemployment isn’t natural to the universe, he said, it contradicts cosmic laws and isn’t healthy. 

Whatever rejection we might be experiencing at this very moment, it’s okay that it hurts. But also know that our rejections are our achievements for sticking ourselves out there. 

Every no we suffer is another opportunity to show the world that our value is stronger than the barbs it can throw at us. 

To quote Tom Waits, one of the greatest living songwriters:

When it’s cold and there’s no music, and your old hometown’s so far away, inside your head there’s a record that’s playing, hold on, hold on. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Are you allowing rejection to hold your happiness hostage?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

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