The art of coping with rejection

Book review of Spring: Bouncing Back From Rejection

We have all sipped our doses of self-help books to navigate through different stages of our life: Think and Grow Rich (Napoleon Hill); The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey); and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck  (Mark Manson). But today’s questions are different. Are the issues in these time-tested bestsellers relevant to the challenges and rejections we face in 21st century India?

Which book will aid us in dealing with the classic worries of 21st century middle class Indian life such as those that a student faces: Will I get shortlisted by the company (of my dreams) for an interview? Or the ones that a hard-working middle manager in a bank faces: Will my proposal get rejected by the senior management? Or the ones a talented sales manager faces: Will my sales pitch get rejected by the client? Or the ones that practically everyone faces in the corporate world: Will my boss reject my ideas? Will my colleagues reject my suggestions? Will I get selected for better postings inside the company? Will the good work I am doing as a Collector in this backward district of a backward state be recognised by my bosses in Delhi?

In  Spring: Bouncing Back from Rejection Ambi Parameswaran, provides a central concept to deal with all these rejections or the fear of such rejections: “Spring back” from the rejections you encounter in life.

As he shows, part of the reason a person feels downcast after facing a setback in life could be that he believes that such adversity is unique to him. When he sees successful people, for example business tycoons, he imagines that they have flitted through life from one success to another, never having had to face rejection or setbacks. 

The author provides examples to show that the reality is quite the opposite by recounting the example of Infosys: “While Infosys is a stock market darling today and has been for well over two decades, its initial public offering (IPO) was met with a lukewarm response and had to get its underwriters/bankers to pick up the unsubscribed portion of the issue. But if someone had invested  Rs 10,000 in 1993 at the time of the Infosys IPO, they would have been richer by more than Rs 2 crore on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the IPO. That translates into a two-thousand multiple in twenty-five years, outclassing any other form of investment. So some of the biggest successes we see around us have had to battle multiple rejections.”
 

Spring: Bouncing Back From Rejection
Author: Ambi Parameswaran
Publisher: Westland
Price: Rs 399

When you come to world of arts, the possibilities of rejection are endless. The author recounts the case of Amish Tripathi, today, practically a household name in India whose books have sold many millions of copies and counting. When Amish wrote his book and approached publishers, one after another they ignored it. What is “mythological fiction”? they asked him sneeringly. “Is it mythology? No. Is it fiction? Not really. Are the characters part of Indian mythology? Yes. But are their stories, tales as we have read elsewhere? No. Definitely not. So what was it? Finally, Amish and his agent decided to publish the first book of the Shiva Trilogy, Immortals of Meluha themselves. And the book sold out instantly.”

Rejection in the world of Bollywood is even more frequent and real. Judgements about what script or what actor or what screenplays will be a hit is almost impossible to tell. The world of politics perhaps closely resembles Bollywood with absolutely no certainty about the outcome of an election. And there are many other parts of Indian life that make people face rejections and deal with them — you could say practically all parts of life.

Mr Parameswaran, brings some semblance of logic  to this by providing rational methods of dealing with these uncertainties . His journey through life as a graduate of IIT Madras and IIM Calcutta and his work experience in the business world of Mumbai and his teaching stints  at IIM Calcutta, IIM Ahmedabad, MICA and at S P Jain Institute of Management and Research have clearly opened his eyes to a wide variety of experiences in dealing with rejection.

One of his suggestions is to “look at every rejection as a learning opportunity. Don’t let a rejection destroy your enthusiasm. Learn from the rejection and get better the next time.” He then goes on to spell in great detail each step of this process. The value of this book can be summed up in one sentence: To be successful you should be ready to face rejection and failure and, through multiple examples, the author guides you through the vast variety of rejections that exist in today’s world with tips on how to deal with them and spring back.

The reviewer is an internet entrepreneur