When your project, proposal or resume is rejected, it’s tempting to try to understand why.
Scrutinize the rejection letter and turn the short sentence into a paragraph or an essay, then play it over and over in your search for how to do better next time.
If you can simply answer this rejection, next time will go better.
The frustration really kicks in when the reasons begin to conflict. Too hot, too cold. Too tall, too short…
The truth is simpler: People who reject you or your work aren’t giving you the real reason. They’re simply inserting “here is where I write a few generic sentences to sound polite.”
Even if you could completely answer the objection in that rejection letter, they’re still going to reject you.
That’s because the rejector isn’t here to teach you anything, and isn’t offering the objection so that you will correct it. They’re simply being nice when they say, “go away.”
The honest rejections would say something like, “my boss didn’t like you,” or “I was in a bad mood,” or “we realized that our spec wasn’t very clear and the person we liked didn’t fit it either,” or “we wanted someone who looked more like us,” or “your competence made us nervous,” or…
Take what they wrote and replace it with “no.”
It’ll save a lot of time.
Keith Jarrett on improvisation.
When the artist is creating in real time, in conjunction with the witnesses in the room, “performance” goes away.
It’s creation.
Improvisation is a privilege, a chance to create without a guarantee.
There’s a village in Luxembourg that’s right outside the main metropolis. A farmer often ties up a donkey to the little bridge leading to town.
The juxtaposition of international digital trading and donkeys is a reminder that as fast as the future arrives, the past also sticks around. We can measure the distance not just in years, but in miles. “How many miles is it to the nearest donkey?” is an interesting metric.
There’s probably a version of the donkey in your office or your town.
You’re not a crow, neither is your project.
To get from a village in rural France to Los Angeles, the trip to London might be a tiny fraction of the distance from London to LA, but it takes more than half the time.
It’s easy to imagine that every step in our journey proceeds at the same velocity, but it rarely does. And just because the destination is in sight doesn’t mean you’re almost there…
PS Here is a fifteen-year-old addendum to yesterday’s post.
Is this where books go to die?
There are about 7500 public libraries in the US, and until recently, more than a third of their transactions were for DVDs.
What’s a library for? The media has changed, our needs have changed, but the dynamics of funding, architecture and expectation have largely remained the same.
The modern library is about community, education and access to tools. It creates an aura of possibility and engages with what’s really scarce–possibility, not data.
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