INBOUND Bold Talks: Jia Jiang "Why Rejection is Awesome"

What? What a fantastic way to talk about rejection, right? How many of you like rejection? Raise your hand. We got one, two. Cool. We can hang out. How many of you feel rejected now? Raise your hand. A few of you. Hopefully this will make you feel better. How many of you like gifts? Raise your hand. Everyone. Good? Good. Now we're good. Okay, so I like gifts. But I didn't like gifts growing up. And here's why. When I was six year old, my first grade teacher one day came up with this brilliant idea. She wanted us to not only get holiday gifts, but also learn the virtue of complimenting each other at the same time. So during holidays, she had all of us come to the front of the room, the class, and she said, why don't we say nice things about each other? If you hear your name called by someone else, go pick up a gift and sit down. So she bought all of the gifts and stacked in the corner. What a great idea, right? What could go wrong? So when it started, it was good. Every time I heard someone else's name called, I would cheer really loudly. Then there were 20 people left and 10 left and three left. There's no more compliments. And that was one of them standing there. You know, at that moment, I didn't want to gift anymore. I didn't want compliments anymore. I just wanted to sit down and I was crying. I had no idea why. No one was saying anything nice about me. I thought I was popular. Then I saw who was standing next to me. I knew otherwise because I hated those two kids. And the teacher was freaking out. She was like, oh my God, will anyone say anything nice about these people? No one. Okay, why don't you just go pick up your gift and sit down. So behave better next year so someone will say something nice about you. As I'm describing this, it's like happened to me yesterday, right? I was when I was six. Ever since that day, I would die not to be in that situation again. Getting rejected in public. But you know, people grow up. So eight years later, when I was 14, I met this guy, Bill Gates. He came to my hometown, Beijing to promote Windows 95. And I was in the audience. I love his story. I loved everything about this guy. And I said, okay, now I know what I want to do with my life. I want to be the Chinese version of Bill Gates. So that night I wrote a letter to my family telling them, by age 25, I will build the biggest company in the world and the company will buy Microsoft from Bill Gates. I just embraced everything about this guy, including his idea of dominating the world. I didn't make this up. I did write that letter. And my family kept this letter all these years for me. It's really bad. Handwritten Chinese, so you don't have to read it. I did highlight some keywords for you, so you know what I'm talking about in that letter. I also said, someday I will come to the US to be an entrepreneur. And two years later I came as a high schooler and I thought, this is the start of a great entrepreneur journey. Someday someone would write books about me like I was Andrew Carnegie, like, you know, this great immigrant entrepreneur. But then Fast forward another 14 years. One day I woke up, I was 30. No, I didn't build the biggest company in the world. I didn't even start. Instead I was working as a marketing manager for a Fortune 500 company. I mean, life was really good. But where was that kid who wrote this letter? And even at work I felt I was stuck. I wasn't progressing. What happened? Just looking back, every time I had a new idea, every time I wanted to step out, every time even I wanted to raise my hand to say something at work or to have a new proposal, I just found there was a constant battle between a 6 year old and a 14 year old. One wanted to change the world, another was afraid of rejection every time that six year old won. And this fear of rejection even stayed with me after I started my company. So at age 30, I quit my job and started my company. You know, if you want to be Bill Gates, you got to start sooner or later, right? And four months into my venture, I was presented with a major investment opportunity. I really thought I was going to get it and I didn't. And it crushed me. So much so that I wanted to quit right there. And this word dawned on me with Bill Gates wanting to give up after a rejection like that. Would anyone successful at anything want to give up after a rejection like that? No way. So I can build a better company. I can improve my team or product. But one thing for sure was I gotta be a better leader. I gotta be a better person. I have to solve that rejection problem once for all. So what did I do? I Googled, you know, Google's my friend. How to overcome my fear of rejection. And I came up with. I saw this website called rejectiontherapy.com. rejection therapy is. I can explain this. It's a game. It's a game designed by this Canadian guy. And basically it gives you flashcards of suggestions of how to get rejected. On purpose for 30 days. The idea is, after 30 days, you get so many rejections, you desensitize yourself from the pain of rejection. You become a badass. I just love the idea, you know, I said, I want to be a badass. I want to be the baddest ass of them all. So I said, forget about 30 days. How about I do 100 days of rejection? I want to go overdose, and I don't use the cars. I'll just come up with my own rejection attempts. You know, use my imagination. And I will use. I would film myself using my phone and just upload this on YouTube to make a video blog out of this or vlog. So that's what I did. And this was what the website looked like then, like I said, Rejection one, borrow $100 from a stranger. Rejection two, get a burger refill. And rejection three, request a Olympic donut. This is where it turned my life upside down. So I got the first two days, I got rejected. It was okay, you know, I learned new things. And on day three, I went to Krispy Kreme. I asked the donut maker to make me donuts that look like Olympic rings. And there's no way they're gonna do that, right? I was wrong. The donut maker took me so seriously. And in 15 minutes, she made it. And not only she made it, she paid for it herself. And that's what the donut looked like. And when I uploaded this video on YouTube, it got over 5 million views. And I couldn't believe this myself. I couldn't believe the human kindness or customer service that this woman showed. You can go find this video. And after that, I started to learn new things. I started to get so much better at rejection and not getting rejected. People started to say yes to me one after another. For example, I had a soccer ball in my hand. I knocked on a stranger's door, and I played soccer in his backyard. And another day, I asked a police officer driving down the highway, can I drive your car? And he said yes to me. So. And it's all these type of things that made my blog went viral. And a lot of people started sending me emails and, you know, social media comments saying, wow, what are you doing? Is really inspiring. And I was like, well, I'm just overcoming my fear of rejection. Until I saw people started to overcome their own fear of rejection and making some real changes in their lives. That people found businesses, that people find better jobs, that people progressed in their career. There are people started a podcast, and there's a person Started a ministry for prostitutes. It was just all these things that got me thinking, wow, what is this? What is this thing? I thought I was the only one who had this fear. And it turned out everyone had this fear. If they overcome the fear, they can make some real changes in their lives and in the world. So I started using the rest of my 100 days as an experiment, as a lab, so I can find out how can I get people to say yes to me while not lying a word. I want to stay authentic. And doing that, I learned so much. For example, I learned that if you don't run after rejection, you can negotiate and possibly turn a no into a yes. Usually when we get rejected, our natural responses are fight or flight. We either argue, we either back away. But there's a third way, which is asking why. If you ask why, you can sometimes turn find the underlying reason for the rejection and turn a no into a yes. For example, one day I had a flower in my hand, and I knocked on a stranger's door. And so the guy opened the door, I said, can I plant this flower in your backyard? I don't know why I like people's backyard that much. And he said, no. So but before he could turn around, I asked him why. He said, I have a dog that would dig up anything I put in the backyard. I don't want to waste your flowers. If you don't do this. Go talk to Connie, my neighbor. She loves flowers. I was so excited because I just got my referral. So I went across the street and talked to Connie, and she was so happy to see me. And half an hour later, there was this flower in Connie's backyard. I'm sure it looks better now, I hope. Also, I learned there are things you can do to maximize your chance of getting yes. One of these things to do is to show a weakness or doubt the other person might have of you. So one day I went to a Starbucks. I talked to the manager and said, can I be your greeter? He's like, what's a greeter? I said, do you know those Walmart greeters? You know, they say hi to you when you walk in and make sure you don't steal stuff from them. I want to be the world's first greeter for Starbucks, and I want to give you a customer as a Walmart experience. I was really bad argument, by the way. And he was like. I could tell he was trying to say yes to me, but he had no idea what the heck I was doing. And I asked him, is that Weird. He's like, yeah, it's really weird, man. But when he said that, his whole tone changed. The conversation changed. He said, okay, I can let you do this, but please don't be too weird. Please don't try to sell stuff to my customers. I said, no, I won't. I just want to be a greeter. So for the next hour, I was Starbucks first and only greeter. I said hi to every customer who walked in, I gave them high fives and I showed them my favorite coffee. By the way, I don't know what your career trajectory is, but don't be a greeter. It was really boring job, but I could get this guy to say yes to me because I asked him, is that weird? By asking, is that weird? I show one thing. I wasn't weird. I would just like him knowing what I was asking was weird. And then, oh, by the way, that's him by the way. Also, I learned I can fulfill my dream by just asking sometimes. So I come from a family of teachers of five generations of teachers. My grandma has always told me, hey Jia, you can be anything you want, but it'd be great if you're a teacher, you know, how's that for encouragement? But I want to be entrepreneur. So I didn't end up a teacher, but I had always this dream to teach something, to teach a college class. I thought I have to go become a really famous person or become a successful entrepreneur to actually be invited. But in this 100 days, I said, this is my excuse to do anything I want. I'll just go ask. So I walked down to the University of Texas in Austin and I knock on professors doors and one professor opened the door and I said, can I teach you a class? He's like, what are you teaching? I was like, I can teach entrepreneurship or rejection. So I had this whole my lecture loaded up on my iPad. I was showing him and he was so impressed. He was like, I've never seen anyone doing this and sure, I can fit you in my curriculum. It sounds fun. So a couple months later he invited me to teach class and turned out he was teaching communication for social change. If you only really change the world, you're going to get a lot of rejections. So I was teaching rejection that day. This is my lecture. You probably can't see it. Sometimes you get rejected by lighting. But when I finished the lecture, I had a standing ovation. I had tears in my eyes because I fulfilled my dream and I felt my grandma was there with me that day. But also in that Lecture. I was quoting Martin Luther King Jr. And because the people who really changed the world are people like Martin Luther King Jr. Like Mahatma Gandhi, like Nelson Mandela, or even Jesus Christ, these are the people who faced violent and gruesome rejections. They all died for it. But they let their action after rejection defined them. They embraced it. That's how they changed the world. And in my case, rejection was my bogeyman, was a monster that haunted me my whole life. But as soon as I stopped running away from rejection, it became my biggest gift in life. Now I use my blog, my book, my videos, and my talk to teach people how to overcome their fear of rejection. And so for you, maybe you feel rejected now with work, with business, with politics, but just, you know, next time you face rejection, if you don't run, if you embrace it, and if you don't let rejection define you, but let your action after rejection define you, it might become your biggest gift as well. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Hello. How are you guys doing? I'm so excited to be here today. I'm going to talk to you about how I turned my everyday observations into a whole new career.

And.

And especially I'm going to talk to you about those tiny little ideas that you think nothing of, but that could become something really amazing if you'd only let them. So my story starts nine years ago. I was in a meeting, and it was like any other meeting when a product manager got up from the table, went over to the whiteboard and started to draw something. The room became silent as everyone watched what this product manager was drawing. And it turned out to be a Venn diagram. And it was sort of related to what we were talking about, but ultimately it just made no sense at all. But instead of everyone kind of making fun of him, something weird happened. Everyone started helping him draw the Venn diagram. They were like, oh, make this circle bigger and make this one smaller and change the labels. And I watched in amazement as this product manager just took the marker, handed it to someone else, sat back down at his desk, went back to working on his laptop while everyone else obsessed over this ridiculous Venn diagram. And I thought to myself, that was a pretty cool trick that made him look pretty smart. So I wrote it down in my how to look smart in a meeting, draw a Venn diagram. Now, his Venn diagram wasn't as ridiculous as this one, but it was pretty close. Now, I put that notebook away and I didn't look at it for seven years. And then I came across it again. And I was at Google at the time and I had been in even more meetings than I hadn't been before. And it kind of re sparked this idea of what do the smart people do in meetings? Because without articulating it, I knew that a very large part of my job was to go to meetings and look smart in them. So I knew that if I went to a meeting and I said something really insightful that everyone was really impressed with, I would replay that moment in my head for days, sometimes weeks later. And I wanted to put together more of these tricks. And so I created a blog post called 10 tricks to appear Smart in Meetings. And I added some more tricks to it. Tricks like translate percentages into fractions. I remember when someone said 25% of people clicked on this button and someone chimed in with, oh, about one in four and made a note of it. I was like, those math skills are very impressive. Ask the presenter to go back a slide. It doesn't matter where in the presentation you yell this out, it'll immediately make you look like you're paying closer attention to that slide than everyone else. And your co workers will be so excited to see what you're going to say. But all you have to do is just kind of nod, look at it, and go, okay, we can move on. Ask will this scale, no matter what it is, just ask if it's going to scale. No one even knows what that means, but it drives engineers nuts and it makes you look really, really smart. Now, I was a little scared about posting this because I was still working at Google at the time, and I didn't want my co workers to think that I was making fun of them, even though I was. But I posted it anyway, and it just took off. It had a few hundred thousand views within a few days. It had a million views within a few weeks. And I was blown away by the response. And when I did that, I had no idea that some little thing that I wrote in a notebook would later become a blog post that would go viral. That would later lead to me quitting my job to follow my dream of writing. That would lead to me publishing my very first book, 100 tricks to appear Smart in Meetings. This is my first book. And as part of the reason that I'm here today, I'll actually be signing the book right after this talk. And if I had known this, honestly, I would have done it a lot sooner. I wouldn't have taken almost 10 years to do. Really made me wonder, you know, what other ideas had I just scribbled down and just completely tossed aside without even really thinking about them or what other ideas had I tried to do but just kind of gave up on before I even gave them a chance? And what other ideas have you guys written down in a notebook and just said, oh, whatever, this doesn't mean anything, Even though it's something that you might be really excited about, and you just haven't given it a chance to become something. I do this all the time now. There's a backstory here, of course. I am the youngest of four kids, and I have an older brother and two older sisters. And I was really, really close to my sisters growing up and really protective of them because they both had severe issues they were dealing with. My older sister, Charmaine, was born deformed, with the bones in her face were underdeveloped, and she was in and out of surgeries all throughout my childhood. My other sister had a learning disability. And so I developed a great sense of empathy because of my sisters. And they're fine now and very happy and very successful. And I think that because of that, I minimized myself. And I thought it was kind of a noble thing to do. It was kind of a noble thing to say, well, what I'm going through is not as important as what everyone else is going through. But it meant that I didn't really speak up in meetings. I didn't really share my opinions. I didn't really take my ideas that seriously because it seemed like what other people were going through was just way more important and big and huge than what I was going through. I have always admired people that have been able to share their ideas, and you've probably seen a ton of that this week. You know, forgive the cliche, but they're able to climb up a mountain and say, hey, look at me. Look at all my ideas. Look at everything that I want to do. And they just kind of steadfastly shout it out, and they're so passionate, and they believe in themselves. And I'm kind of the person that's behind the mountain that's like, hey, I have an idea. Maybe. I don't know. Whatever. You don't have to look at me. It's okay. And I always knew that I could climb up that mountain and be that person, but I would always talk myself out of it. You know, I've started a blog post and quit. I've started a web series and I quit. I've created a product, and I've quit. I just started things and quit them so many times over the years. And I will look back at something that I started five years ago, and I'll be like, that was pretty good. Why didn't I keep going with that? Why didn't I give it a chance? And there's this concept of how you can do better for yourself in the future. You can think about yourself as future you. And you can think, what can you do today to help future you be proud of what you've done? But I like to think about past me. I like to think about past me who had that idea and past me who just didn't give it a chance. And for the first time, I started to have empathy for myself, and I started to think about how disrespectful it was for me to look at my own ideas and say they didn't mean anything and they didn't matter. And for the first time, I realized that not taking my ideas seriously meant that I wasn't taking myself seriously. And thinking my ideas weren't important was the same as thinking I wasn't important. Now everyone says you have imposter syndrome, right? All the best people have imposter syndrome. So you should be really proud of that. But I'm like, what if my imposter syndrome will never be good enough? Someone sent me this quote, make sure the world remembers your name. But I don't even know who said that. And then, of course, there's Nike. Just do it. Just go for it. Keep going. Keep persevering. Don't give up. But if you don't take your ideas seriously, you'll never be able to finish and follow through with it, because you'll always think that it's just not worth it. Now we're always thinking about what's my passion, what's the thing that I was really, really meant to be doing, and how do I find that? But I think we get obsessed with this idea of success, and we put it up on this pedestal like this thing will never reach. And we think about this person that we really respect and admire and how we'll never get there, and how what we're doing doesn't fit into what they're doing. And I think that leads us to ignore what might be sitting right in front of you. What I realized is the things that I gravitated towards when I was supposed to be doing something else were the things that ended up bringing me the most happiness. When I was supposed to be paying attention in meetings, I was observing my co workers, and that was the thing that brought me joy. And your passion might be the thing that you're already doing, you're already doing it and you just don't realize that it could lead to something really great. Once I started taking my ideas seriously and putting them out there, it led to the cooperreview.com and all of these other observations. Like I would take walks and do the dishes and when I would do these things, all these observations would come into my head. And this is the best way to figure out what your passion is. Where does your mind go? Where do you gravitate towards? I realized that on Fridays, every Friday, I would say, you know what, I'm just going to move all these meetings to Monday. And then on Monday I would hate myself. And I turned this into a comic that got shared thousands of times. I noticed that whenever I sent myself a reminder email, 10 seconds later I'd be like, oh, a new email. And be excited, not realize that's from me. Actually, I moved recently from New York to San Francisco and I created a few posts about all the observations of the differences between the two different cities. One of them is in New York City, someone might look rich, but they probably aren't. And in San Francisco, they might look poor, but they're probably a multimillionaire. And then like Laura mentioned, I I created nine non threatening leadership strategies for women because I realized I would always sort of try to make myself seem a lot nicer. Like in emails, instead of just saying, send me the presentation when it's ready, I'd add a lot of smiley faces and a lot of exclamation points and try to make it seem as nice as possible. And I really have no idea when I put something out there, what's going to resonate with people and what people are going to identify with. But I realized finally that if I don't finish it and I don't share it and I don't try, I will never know. So the point is, you have to do a lot of work, you have to finish a lot of work, and you have to share a lot of work in order to realize what it is that you are meant to be doing. And I love this quote from Ira Glass about how when you start to create something, what you create at first won't be as good as what you want to create and you'll be disappointed in it. But only by doing a lot of work will you be able to close that gap between what you want to create and what you actually do create. So my advice to you is to take out those old dusty notebooks and look through them. See what you've been writing about. See what you've been doodling in the corners. Or maybe start a new notebook. Follow where your mind is taking you, because it's taking you there for a reason. Thank you.