Typically it's the kind of sales work hackers dislike. But plenty of people have built good careers around a sunny tolerance for rejection. Real estate agents, insurance sales people, cold callers, door-to-door sales people -- all of them experience many rejections for each closed sale.
One successful sales person told me that "it's just a numbers game." I still think about this with every rejection I receive.
It's vanishingly rare that rejections are actually personal in any real sense anyhow. At least when business is concerned. Heck, even when they know you, it's rarely personal - personal circumstances and biases are a far greater factor than any real animosity.
Except for a few comical asides, you never remember the no's anyhow.
This leads me to an idea: What about if a bunch of hacker entrepreneurs got together and agreed to try to sell eachother's products? It could actually be fun to try to pitch something where you have no emotional investment in the product. Naturally you would do your best to succeed and agree to document all the responses from prospective clients.
If the object of the game is to learn how to feel comfortable being rejected by people then perhaps it's better to not include rejections that result from policy in your score.
For example, if you ask for a discount in a store and the clerk rejects you, they are just acting on store policy, not giving a personal reaction.
If you sell door to door the person who tells you to get lost is most likely rejecting what you are selling or rejecting the idea of being harassed by a salesman, rather than rejecting you personally.
Or "marriage."
I don't get why the joke would be funny, I would find it sad if true and bizarre if made up.
I'm not a "sale type" but I've actually been doing some part-time canvasing lately just to have the 'getting over the rejection hump' experience.
It's easier and more pleasant for me since sales still isn't my job.
I've been doing part-time canvasing and I can accumulate far more than 30 rejections in the less than an hour.
But I still have no-rejection days. Does it matter?
I'd take a bet that you're not the type this was designed for. For some, being rejected at all is a huge blow to ego, confidence, and self-esteem, which can have serious effects on mood and productivity, for instance.
For these people, getting rejected more often means that each rejection is less significant and reinforces the knowledge that rejection happens. That is much healthier, and I'd hypothesize that it can increase one's average level of happiness. (It also gives an individual much more control over himself -- or takes it away from others, at any rate. Same thing.)
Yes, but this sort of "therapy" only works if you have the right thought patterns to go with the rejection (i.e. not taking it too personally, realizing it's not that big of a deal, etc). It may not work so well if you (were raised to) believe that you have to please others in order to feel good about yourself. In that case, each rejection is just more evidence that "you suck", and you enter a downward spiral.
I have had quite a bit of trouble with rejection at different times.
My suspicion is that everyone who doesn't have some up-front, obvious fear of rejection has some other kind of fear buried somewhere in their psyche.
seems to me that not only will you not feel the pain of rejection, you also won't be able to reap the benefit when there's an unexpected yes.
So yes, it can be worth it just for the experience.
My response is to quote Nassim Taleb: "Be gullible in the small, and skeptical in the large." http://akkartik.name/blog/9400292 It's an extremely rational strategy.
If they work, great.
If they don't, and you tried really hard, I can't imagine anything more likely to help desensitize you.
