i had a spreadsheet of 200 influencers.
names, follower counts, content style, engagement rate. segmented by niche. color-coded by priority. the whole system.
this was for a client.. SpaceLVN, a luxury property brand in las vegas. the pitch was tailored experiences at high-end houses. not "come stay here and post." more like.. we design something around your content, your audience, your vibe. the houses become sets, studios, backdrops for whatever world the creator is building.
good idea. real idea.
and i sat on it for three days.
not because i didn't believe in it. i did. the pitch was solid, the properties were nice, the concept made sense for both sides.
i just didn't want to hear no.
that's the honest version. the strategic version is "i was refining the outreach sequence" or "optimizing the segmentation." but refining is just stalling with a system.
because the moment you send the first cold DM, you're no longer in the safe zone of planning. you're in the zone where someone can look at what you made and go.. nah.
and that's a different feeling entirely.
jia jiang spent 100 days deliberately seeking rejection from strangers. asking for impossible things just to feel the no. and his insight wasn't about becoming fearless. it was about seeing that most rejection is softer than the version your brain invents beforehand.
i hadn't read his book yet when i was sitting on that spreadsheet. but i was living the exact thing he was studying.
📤 sending it
when i finally started sending.. like actually hitting send, not drafting and redrafting.. something weird happened.
the first few were the hardest. obviously. you're watching the "seen" notification like it's a verdict. someone opens your message, doesn't respond, and your brain writes the whole story. they think it's spam. they think i'm nobody.
naomi eisenberger's fMRI research showed that social rejection lights up the same brain regions as physical pain. literally the same wiring. so when your chest tightens before pressing send on cold outreach.. that's not weakness. that's sales psychology wired into your nervous system.
but by message 15 or 20, something shifted. the weight of each send got lighter. not because i stopped caring.. but because the volume diluted the stakes. any single rejection stopped being a referendum on me and started being just.. one data point in a spreadsheet.
which is what it always was. i just couldn't see it when there was only one row.
most of the fear of rejection isn't even a no. it's silence. a "seen" with no reply. a "sounds cool, let me think about it" that evaporates.
and then every once in a while someone responds with genuine interest and you realize.. the 40 people who didn't respond weren't rejecting me. they were just busy. or it wasn't their thing. or they didn't check DMs that day.
the rejection i was afraid of barely existed. what existed was volume.. and i wasn't moving through enough of it to see the pattern.
chet holmes called this the Dream 100.. disciplined repetition on the right targets beats any single perfect pitch. the pitch didn't need to be perfect. it needed to be sent. repeatedly.
a few influencers came back interested. real conversations about the properties, the concept, what collaboration would look like. and those conversations only happened because i'd already burned through the discomfort of the 30 messages before them.
richard fenton wrote Go for No! where the whole premise is: top performers set rejection quotas, not success quotas. increasing the rate of no mathematically increases the rate of yes. which sounds obvious in theory. but when you're staring at a cold DM draft at 11pm it doesn't feel obvious at all.
the SpaceLVN project taught me something i keep relearning.
the fear of rejection is almost always bigger than the rejection itself.
and the only way to shrink it is to move through it with speed.
not slowly. not carefully. fast.
because when you're moving fast, you don't have time to build a story around each no.
you just log it and send the next one. and somewhere in that rhythm, the flinch starts to fade away.
it doesn't disappear. i still feel it.
every cold outreach, every pitch, every time i put something in front of someone who could say no..
there's a version of me that wants to go back to the spreadsheet and "refine the segmentation" for another day.
but i know what that is now.
i wonder sometimes if people who seem fearless about pitching confidence and putting themselves out there actually feel less of that flinch..
or if they've just gotten so used to moving through it that it barely registers.
is confidence the absence of the fear, or just a faster recovery time?
martin seligman would say the second.
his work on learned optimism is that resilience isn't personality.. it's a skill.
you build it the same way you build any system.
which means overcoming rejection isn't something you're born with.
it's something you train through.
and maybe that's what sitting on a spreadsheet for three days teaches you. the skills were there. the pitch was ready. the will was the bottleneck.
the thing you're avoiding isn't the no. it's finding out what you're worth when someone has the option to say it.
if you're staring at a list of people you should've messaged last week.. send the first one.
the worst version of no is almost always quieter than the version in your head.