Why Rejection Is Actually Important For Achieving Success | Guy Raz EP 780

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:12The one thing that binds every person I interview is I'll either have naturally or have learned to develop the ability to withstand rejection. To basically accept that lots of people are going to say no and keep kind of grinding through it. I never knew this guy, Topio Otana. His first job, while he was a college student, was selling ADT home monitoring services door-to-door. And he's this kid who's from Nigeria. He came to the U.S. when he was 16. And he's going door-to-door in Athens, Georgia, knocking on doors, trying to sell people home monitoring systems. And I said to him, I said, didn't you ever get discouraged with all those doors slamming in your face?

0:55Didn't you get tired of hearing people saying, like, no soliciting? And he said, no, because I knew that there was a hit rate. And, you know, eventually one of those doors would open and the person would say yes. And I would make a commission on that sale. And that was more money than I ever had in my life. So it was fine. I mean, it's a similar story with Sarah Blakely, who founded Spanx. Like she sold fax machines door to door. It was she describes it as torture, but it steeled her when it came time to starting her business. like she had to find a textile manufacturer that was willing to make a prototype of these undergarments that no one had ever seen before.

1:30And all these textile plants said no until one finally said yes, but she was ready for that process because she had gone through like rejection exposure therapy. Getting to a place where you have found some success, it's sort of like when an airplane takes lift and then, you know, you hit cruising altitude at 35 ,000 feet and there will be turbulence. But I think that in general, in my experience, I think once you have achieved some level of success, it's easier to build on that because people have seen you succeed in some fashion or form. Like what I do, what you do. I mean, 25 years ago when I started out on radio before it was podcasting, I couldn't get on the air.

2:14Why would somebody give me a chance? You know, I had no track record. No one knew who I was. Nobody knew if I was any good. And I sucked, by the way. Right. You suck when you start. You suck and then you suck less and then a little less and a little less. But once I started to go on air, it was like that domino falls. And other people was like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You can do a story or sure. We'll take your pitch. And it's the same thing with, I think, with entrepreneurship, which is that lift, you know, that keeps them flying. I'm a thousand percent believer that virtually every skill that entrepreneurs have are acquired.

2:52The idea of going door to door to sell something or pitching people on your product, going to investors, it's really hard. It requires the ability to hear no and to keep fighting. I have ended up interviewing a significant number of Mormon entrepreneurs. Okay. Now Mormons are a tiny percentage of the American population, like 2%, okay, they have a pretty significantly high rate of entrepreneurship in their community and their culture and also business success. So what is it that they're doing differently? Well, they're doing something very different than pretty much every other population in America.

3:30They send their 18-year-olds to a country around the world and they say, go live somewhere for two years and get as many converts says you can. You're going to have to knock on a thousand doors to get five, ten people to accept the Book of Mormon. You have to be polite and gracious and friendly. You can't be like, why are you slamming the door in my face? Like, you are a Mormon missionary. You're representing the church. Like, you've got to be really polite and friendly and kind. So, those kids go abroad for two years. They come back to the U.S., Utah, wherever. They start college. They're way more equipped than your average 21-year-old to start their lives and also to start a business.

4:07I'm not suggesting that everybody become a Mormon. I'm saying that it's a really interesting kind of case study. You know, I don't think the church deliberately setting its young people up to be entrepreneurs, but it's setting them up to be independent. And so that's a learned skill. I mean, Mormons are not preternaturally more gifted in rejection of the ability to withstand rejection. They just had two years of it. So they're better at it. And I think all of us can kind of replicate that in a sense. When I was a kid, school fundraisers were going door to door to sell chocolate bars. My parents were like, yeah, go sell your chocolate bars.

4:43And I would just walk around the neighborhood and knock on doors. And now I think it'd be a little bit harder. But, you know, kids were kind of exposed to that more than they are today. Not to say that life was better when I was younger. It's just to say that these are things that you can do. You can instill in yourself and in the people you know. You know, I think we tend to hope that the product or the idea or the concept that we're talking about will be validated by the people we know or even people we don't know because we believe in it. And I think for most of us, our passion and our belief and our connection and commitment to that can be fairly easily shattered if enough people are like, this sucks or this is stupid.

5:23But what I think this kind of rejection slash going to the balcony technique does is it enables you to take the long view. I mean, here's a great example. Tristan Walker, one of my favorite entrepreneurs I ever interviewed. He started this company called Bevel. Okay. Now, here's the thing that most white men don't know. Most white men who shave go and buy a razor. You get the Gillette five blade or six blade or eight. Mach three, Mach seven, whatever. And you like it because it has five blades and shaves your skin and it actually shaves under your skin. Well, if you have curly hair and many African-American men do, that's not actually good for your skin.

6:03And so shaving is really it's very traumatic, especially when young black men start to shave because they break out, you get bumps, bumps and scars. You know, there are no products that have spoken or have really been developed for young black men. And so he set out to build a razor. It's called the Bevel. And he didn't want to be like this razor that you found at like the bottom of the ethnic aisle. He wanted it to be like an iPhone. He wanted to be a beautiful razor and like a beautiful box that was right there next to Gillette and whatever else and was as premium. You know, he had a lot of people saying there's no market for this or even though he knew that African-Americans spend more on beauty products proportionally than almost any community in America.

6:47You know, I said, how did you, how were you able to keep going when you kept hearing no? When you, when, when there were people who were saying, you know, this is, this is going nowhere. And he said, I kept going because I knew that if I couldn't make this work, nobody could make this work. And it was never going to see the light of day. But I also knew that it had to see the light of day because I needed it for me. I knew a lot of other men needed it for them too. And it's just such an inspiring idea, you know?

7:18I am so excited for you to finish the rest of your day strong. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description and it'll take you to the full episode of my other show, The School of Greatness. Make sure to come back tomorrow for another episode of The Daily Motivation Show.