World Domination Summit
I got to see Jia Jiang a couple of weeks ago in Portland, Oregon at a conference called “World Domination Summit.” Thankfully, I only travelled from San Diego. Can you imagine going thru immigration (several folks came from other countries) and telling the passport reviewer that you were coming into the US for a “World Domination Summit?”
I didn't take a picture of it, but another person did.
If you don't know his story, I don't want to ruin it for you. Here's the 12-minute version he gave at a TedX conference.
Embracing Rejection
I spent the last two days at a conference in San Francisco (WordCamp San Francisco) which was great. Mostly it was a time of hanging out with friends, some of whom I normally only interact with online.
But I did have one conversation with a young developer who was frustrated with a product they were developing and it wasn't going well.
As I drove home from the airport tonight I thought more and more about it and realized that Jiang's 100 days of rejection therapy were something all of us should embrace.
We need to get good about embracing rejection or we give it too much power. I had dinner with a different developer this past weekend as well. And we laughed about his very start in programming. As a seventeen-year-old, he partnered with someone older and worked together for three years. But after enough drama and frustration, he quit.
Except his partner sent emails to their entire customer list saying she had fired the young man. Talk about public rejection! Thankfully, he moved thru it.
In fact, the next few days and a bit of hustle brought him more business than he'd ever seen.
What about you?
What do you fear? What stresses you out? What worries you? Is it the fear of being rejected? Then maybe you need to create opportunities where you can learn to hear “no” so you can develop the internal strength to keep moving forward—to keep saying “yes” to yourself, in spite of what you hear from others.