How to Never Let Rejection Bother You Again

Lessons I learned from James Altucher — sit up and rethink about how you currently live life

Anangsha Alammyan
Publishous
Published in
8 min readMay 31, 2020

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Let’s be honest for a while, rejection is NEVER easy to deal with.

Especially you are someone trying to establish your art or grow your business, taking to rejection to the heart can be debilitating for your work.

The fear of rejection is so crippling, it stops us from trying out new avenues because there is always a voice inside our head going, “What if you fail?”

According to entrepreneur, public speaker, and author, James Altucher, there are three basic responses to rejection:

  • “I suck. I can’t do this. I give up.”
  • “They are stupid. I’m going to keep pushing forward.”
  • “Hmm, what can I do differently? What can I learn from this rejection?”
Goodreads

This article is about the lessons about dealing with rejection and surviving failure that I learned from Altucher’s brilliant book Choose Yourself!. Read it, if you haven’t already. Altucher’s writing is crisp, compelling, and hilarious. He is probably one of the few self-help writers out there who will light a fire in your heart and force you to take action right away.

How to Use Rejection to Push Forward

As a fledgeling entrepreneur, the first step towards making peace with rejection is to realise that you need to improve. Once you have set that straight, you need to figure out what was it that you were doing wrong and what can you do to not make the same mistake. Altucher suggests taking a hard look at your product, to take a step back and brainstorm about ten things you can do to improve what you are already doing. This is not going to be an easy list to make, but, it will probably be one of the most important things you do on this journey of self-realisation.

In other words, change up, don’t give up.

Expand the universe of decision-makers

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