A breezy guide to dealing with rejection and transforming it into a learning experience.
A book written from personal experience about rejection—how to live with it and learn from it.
Jia attempted to subject himself to rejection for 100 days, thus toughening himself to what he most feared. As a boy in China, he dreamed of becoming the next Bill Gates, an entrepreneur whose ideas and accomplishments would change the world. Instead, he was trapped in a corporate environment, very successful but deeply unsatisfied after having “sold out my dream.” He’d done so out of fear of rejection—not of failure, which would at least require him to put his efforts and ideas on the line, but of the fear that those ideas would meet rejection that he couldn’t handle. So, with his wife’s blessing, the author quit his corporate job in Austin, Texas, and gave himself six months to succeed as an entrepreneur. Along the way, he steeled himself by committing to “100 Days of Rejection,” in which he would make requests of strangers that they would likely decline, and thus thicken his skin. He asked Costco and Southwest Airlines to let him make announcements over their public address systems, asked a stranger to let him play soccer in his backyard, asked Starbucks to let him serve as a greeter and asked people for money. As he posted blog videos of his failures, some went viral, leading to a sidelight as a motivational speaker (and to this book). He soon found that he was receiving a greater percentage of acceptances instead of the rejections he’d anticipated. It probably helped that he launched this project in Austin, a freethinking city that prides itself on its quirkiness, but the lessons he learned have wide applicability. He sees what he did as “a journey of transformation. I conquered my fear, gained knowledge and wisdom and found a new kind of freedom and power.”
A breezy guide to dealing with rejection and transforming it into a learning experience.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-4138-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
The ideas may be disconcerting, but they’re backed by solid research and presented with persuasive charm and wit.
Gilbert (Psychology/Harvard) examines what science has discovered about how well the human brain can predict future enjoyment.
Happiness is a subjective experience for which there is no perfectly reliable measuring instrument, the author asserts. The least flawed instrument we have is “the honest, real-time report of the attentive individual,” and to compensate for its flaws, scientists turn to the law of large numbers—i.e., measuring again and again to get lots of data. We use our imagination to look into the future, Gilbert states, but three principal shortcomings restrict its usefulness in the realm of foresight. He labels these shortcomings “realism,” “presentism” and “rationalization,” considering each in turn. Citing psychological experiments, some of which he conducted himself, the author deftly and humorously demonstrates that when we imagine future circumstances, we leave out some details that will occur and provide others that won’t. Realism ignores these adjustments and assumes that our perceptions simply reflect objective reality. Further, when we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible both to ignore how we are feeling now and to recognize how we will regard what happens later, a difficulty that Gilbert cleverly likens to trying to imagine the taste of marshmallow while chewing liver. Presentism occurs when we project the present onto the future. Rationalization is the failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen, the bad not so terrible and the good less wonderful. How then can we predict how we will feel under future circumstances? Gilbert’s answer is simple: Ask others who are in those circumstances today how they are feeling. To those who would protest that they are unique and that others’ experiences could not be relevant, he responds: No you’re not; you just like to think you are.
The ideas may be disconcerting, but they’re backed by solid research and presented with persuasive charm and wit.Pub Date: May 5, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4266-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
Clever and accessibly conversational, Manson reminds us to chill out, not sweat the small stuff, and keep hope for a better...
The popular blogger and author delivers an entertaining and thought-provoking third book about the importance of being hopeful in terrible times.
“We are a culture and a people in need of hope,” writes Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life, 2016, etc.). With an appealing combination of gritty humor and straightforward prose, the author floats the idea of drawing strength and hope from a myriad of sources in order to tolerate the “incomprehensibility of your existence.” He broadens and illuminates his concepts through a series of hypothetical scenarios based in contemporary reality. At the dark heart of Manson’s guide is the “Uncomfortable Truth,” which reiterates our cosmic insignificance and the inevitability of death, whether we blindly ignore or blissfully embrace it. The author establishes this harsh sentiment early on, creating a firm foundation for examining the current crisis of hope, how we got here, and what it means on a larger scale. Manson’s referential text probes the heroism of Auschwitz infiltrator Witold Pilecki and the work of Isaac Newton, Nietzsche, Einstein, and Immanuel Kant, as the author explores the mechanics of how hope is created and maintained through self-control and community. Though Manson takes many serpentine intellectual detours, his dark-humored wit and blunt prose are both informative and engaging. He is at his most convincing in his discussions about the fallibility of religious beliefs, the modern world’s numerous shortcomings, deliberations over the “Feeling Brain” versus the “Thinking Brain,” and the importance of striking a happy medium between overindulging in and repressing emotions. Although we live in a “couch-potato-pundit era of tweetstorms and outrage porn,” writes Manson, hope springs eternal through the magic salves of self-awareness, rational thinking, and even pain, which is “at the heart of all emotion.”
Clever and accessibly conversational, Manson reminds us to chill out, not sweat the small stuff, and keep hope for a better world alive.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-288843-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
