Overcoming Fear of Rejection: Focus on Process
Lessons learned about rejection en route to landing my freshman year internship, echoed by Jia Jiang’s 100 Days of Rejection and the Learning How to Learn Coursera course
After getting 15 rejections off of 15 cold emails to local startups to learn about internship opportunities in November, I was too discouraged to continue. The thought of spending a significant portion of time was discomforting. Plus, it seemed, I would get no responses and it would merely end up being a waste of time.
Fortunately, after some encouragement from mentors, another set of cold emails sent in March led to interviews, culminating in my freshman year internship. The process was described here.
I learned that when approaching a task that can involve lots of rejection (like cold emailing), sometimes it helps to focus on the process of improving at something (the process) instead of achieving something (the product). When I started my second round of cold emailing in March, I created an experiment. I wanted to figure out whether cold emails sent Monday or Tuesday tended to get more responses — I had previously noticed that emails sent between noon and 1 pm seemed to have the highest response rate. So I found 23 companies on madeina2.com and wrote up a cold email from a template asking for a 15-minute call. I scheduled about half for Monday at 12:15 pm and half for Tuesday at 12:15 pm. As the week went by and I started getting responses, I kept track of which cold emails were responded to in a spreadsheet. In the end, the response rate for Monday emails was 7/10 and the response rate for Tuesday emails was 4/13. Information in hand, the next weekend I found about 10 more companies to cold email. I wanted to test a new hypothesis: will I get a higher response rate by hyperlinking my personal website to my name as compared to explicitly saying in my email, “Here is a link to my personal website”? This time, I sent every email at 12:15 pm on Monday. I iteratively tested hypotheses like these every week until I landed my internship.
Following this process, writing cold emails required less willpower. I didn’t want to quit as often. By focusing on a process (learning how to write a better cold email), I felt like I was making progress even when I didn’t get responses — I was gaining more information. I also went into every cold email with lower expectations — I was happy to just gather data.
This sentiment is echoed in the Learning How to Learn Coursera course. They mention that focusing on process instead of product can help with procrastination — doing 30 minutes of studying per day in a hard class seems more manageable than getting an A on the final. It’s also echoed in 100 Days of Rejection by Jia Jiang. Although his final goal is to learn to deal better with rejection (not an external outcome), similar principles are at play — by aiming to get rejected in his interactions, his expectations for each interaction are set lower. And every rejection he gets, he is closer to his goal of being rejected every day for 100 days.
Entering recruiting season for summer 2020, I’m going to network and apply at as many places as I can — every interview is an opportunity to get better at interviewing and test my data structures and algorithms foundation.
