By Making a Game Out of Rejection, a Man Conquers Fear

I play Go and chess, and I think of it this way: the best players may have won more than others, but they have also lost more than others, because they have simply played more games. Frequent loss or rejection is a necessary step to goodness. This also applies to business, the opposite sex, and most anything else that might matter to you.<p>Or, to paraphrase many an artist and CEO: if I have not failed today, it means I have not been ambitious enough.

I have a problem that&#x27;s opposite of his: a fear of acceptance. Making a game out of the rejection game is all fun, except when you don&#x27;t get rejections. Imagine the guy you ask for a ride across the town actually insists you take the ride with him. The girl (re: an earlier comment)who you ask for a number gives you her number, but also asks for yours, and actually calls you to make sure it&#x27;s right.<p>So here&#x27;s my conundrum: one one hand, there&#x27;s a fear of going beyond my comfort zone. On the other there&#x27;s what appears to be (likely quite unjustified) confidence that I will not get rejected as I hope. And thus, stasis.<p>Was it Twain (or Groucho Marx?) who said &quot;I don&#x27;t want to become part of any club that will happily take me as their member&quot;? That&#x27;s quite a problem for me, and it&#x27;s not as devastating as general fear of approaching people, but still quite annoying.

This is a good attitude.<p>My philosophy on failure is a little different. I re-frame my actions as experiments. I come up with a hypothesis, and record the conditions and outcome of my experiments, then do a little mini-analysis on the results to try and understand it. Rather than view getting the outcome I wanted as success, I view learning from the experiment as a success, which is great, because you typically aren&#x27;t in control of the outcome of events, but you absolutely are in control of how methodical you are. This also causes you to learn a lot faster than you otherwise would, which is great too.

He could accelerate his progress if he just did 50 cold calls to random strangers selling diapers a day - he would be super hardened after a week ;-)

As a teenager I went to an all boys school, so was very shy with women. One day I just decided to get over my fear and resolved to ask for the telephone number of every pretty girl that caught my attention in public, even if they were with other girls. Importantly to the process was that it was never my intention to actually call the girl - just to see what percentage gave me their number. Since the outcome was not important, it did not matter if I was successful or not.<p>It worked surprisngly well. I got over my fear and was quite amazed at my success rate. IIRC it was around 25%, maybe even higher.<p>It was important to not be creepy, just friendly and withdraw if the situation became at all uncomfortable.

It&#x27;s possible (probable) that he had developed a fear of rejection due to his divorce, but the very fact that he had a divorce indicates that he had been able to date and marry in the first place (to a poor choice, no doubt). I&#x27;m sure that his approach was able to return him to where he was before, and perhaps improve him, but I wonder if it would be any good for someone with a deep-seated fear of rejection, or if it might not make things worse (perhaps due to a few scenarios ending poorly, or the subject finding himself unable to complete even the simplest ones, and retreating further into himself).

old comments ..<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5035438" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5035438</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1754790" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1754790</a>

video - 5 min<p>&quot;Mark Moschel - 30 Days of Rejection Therapy&quot;<p>Presented at the 2013 Quantified Self Conference<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/79453884" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;79453884</a>

Very good article, but I would say that exposure therapy has limits. I live in an area with lots of rattlesnakes and am terrified of them. I&#x27;m certainly not going to risk a venomous bite to get over my fear.

Fascinating. I do a lot of amateur theatre and one of the most useful things about it is that it forces you to do similar things to on a regular basis and it really does help a lot in various aspects of life. In particular it really helps deal with interview and presentation stress. I&#x27;m very tempted to give this a go myself.

Anyone tried anything like this, informally as described here or in a formal setting?<p>I wonder how often it is successful.

Well, it&#x27;s a great way of finding out what people really think about you. Obviously, this cannot work on a large scale, because a lot of what society does is making sure that people NEVER find out what they think about each other.

I like the empowerment angle of this story, but a couple of the comments raise the valid question of whether or not this (further) breaks society.

Anyone have a deck of cards for handling fear of success?

what is it with gamifaction? I don&#x27;t get it - it doesn&#x27;t motivate me at all, infact it probably has the opposite effect.

Great things often come out of rejection, failure, disappointment. Problems need solutions, etc.

I got a lot of numbers by having a small robot set up with a phone, whereby sending a SMS to that phone with a command would execute it. Add a bit of busking. Doesn&#x27;t mean anyone will want to talk back if you call later, though ;)

If my wife had divorced me and i ended up a crying heap on the floor like this guy i would probably want to try this. Most people are not in that situation though, it&#x27;s all relative.<p>Fair play to him though.

I didn&#x27;t have many friends in school. I never tried to fit in - I found other people in my class to be predictable and uninteresting and it took me too much energy to pretend that I was enjoying their company. I went through several years of school with no friends at all - At times, &#x27;cool&#x27; kids would invite me to play sports with them after school but I never did. I spent all my lunch breaks alone programming games on school library computers.<p>I don&#x27;t have much fear of rejection nowadays. I consistently choose the most difficult life decisions because I like challenges.