U2 rejection letter from 1979

Ben Greenman of the New Yorker shared a cool rejection letter that U2 received in 1979:

It's from the Robert Stigwood Organisation, who may have been best known as the Bee Gees' label. Somehow Paul Hewson (now better known as Bono) and the boys overcame that setback.

Breaking Bad creator describes rejections from networks

From Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, on the Rich Eisen podcast, discussing the fact that several networks passed on the show before AMC picked it up.

Then your studio and you have got to find a distributor or a broadcaster. You have to find your AMC. And that was a bit of a process. Getting to AMC involved several "no thank yous" along the way. Which is not atypical. Every movie, every TV show, every book you ever loved, probably all the ones you hated too, even were said "no" to by a half dozen people or more. But all it takes is the one "yes."

A new academic argument - "Love Rejection"

The Inside Higher Ed site recently published an essay by Brian Martin entitled, "Learning to Love Rejection," in which the author describes coming to terms with the reality that many academic papers are rejected, sometimes many times, before finally finding an outlet. The lessons he learned apply to many other activities where people choose a few and reject many other candidates - hiring, publishing, contests of any sort.

Persistence in seeking publication in a journal has two main steps. The first — the hardest for many — is initially submitting a paper. The second step occurs after a rejection: persistence is a matter of considering the comments from the editor and referees, making changes if desired, finding another journal and sending off the paper. It’s quite straightforward, requiring work to be sure, but seldom an intellectual challenge.

The biggest difficulty is psychological. I know some top scholars who refuse to submit papers to journals because they can’t handle referees’ comments and rejections.

I know many junior scholars who are terrified of rejection and are caught in a syndrome of counterproductive perfectionism and low output. The problem is feeling rejection of a submission as a personal failure. That indeed is hard to stomach.

My approach is to treat the submission process as a game of strategy. It’s about convincing editors and referees that a paper is worthwhile in order to gain access to a credible platform. Submitting a paper to a journal is my move. I wait for the journal’s move, and continue accordingly.

The key here is to distinguish the paper from myself. The paper is my work, not me. If it is rejected, I don’t consider this a personal failing. In playing a game of tennis, it would be silly to give up after losing a point or even a match. The key is to keep practicing and keep playing.

Even so, it can be discouraging to put a lot of work into a piece of work and receive dismissive comments. So I take a few days or weeks to digest the disappointment and plan my next move.

These words from Paulo Coelho, quoted in the Mistake Bank book, might be helpful to academics dealing with this frustration:

I’m never paralyzed by my fear of failure. I say OK, I’m doing my best. After sending a new book or a new article to the publisher or the newspaper, I sit down, I breathe, and I say, “I did my best. I put in all my love, I did it with all my heart.” Whether they are going to like it or not, it is irrelevant. Because I liked it. I’m committed to the thing I did.