Or, to paraphrase many an artist and CEO: if I have not failed today, it means I have not been ambitious enough.
"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
Willingness to fail is a precondition for learning and growth.
He makes the point that (IIRC) Michael Jordan made more last-minute, game-winning throws than anyone else on his team, but he also missed the most game-losing ones. He only excelled by overreaching.
So here's my conundrum: one one hand, there's a fear of going beyond my comfort zone. On the other there's what appears to be (likely quite unjustified) confidence that I will not get rejected as I hope. And thus, stasis.
Was it Twain (or Groucho Marx?) who said "I don't want to become part of any club that will happily take me as their member"? That's quite a problem for me, and it's not as devastating as general fear of approaching people, but still quite annoying.
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'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.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they do, but then I wouldn't be if they were more than averagely depressed, either.
Surely someone must have looked into this.
Largely, my observation of them wasn't that they're particularly thick skinned, nor were they particularly desensitized to rejection. The thing that most of them had in common was that they weren't emotionally bound to the outcome. They didn't care if the person said yes or no - except for the endorphin kick they got when they saw their pay cheque get bigger. For most of them, it was a game they played against each other - in the same way you might enjoy a board game and you strive to win, but the real fun is the camaraderie of the players.
A rejection got a shoulder shrug and a "whatever, next" or a few choice curse words and the finger when the sales person wasted more time than necessary for a sale that never came before quickly moving on to the next call - the previous call forgotten as quickly as the next, unless the conversation was particularly humorous or worth sharing with their compatriots.
Those with no scruples learned to manipulate people really well and got the sales by whatever means necessary. Those that cared got sales by listening to the customer and understanding the customer's needs. Mostly though, almost without exception, those with the most sales were those that got through the highest volume phone calls in a day. The success rate could be skewed to have a higher ratio of sales to calls, but at the end of the day, that took emotional effort and didn't really yield any extra benefit to the sales person - of course, this potentially had a huge negative affect on the reputation of the company. I see the same thing with all the utility companies. Their sales teams are often the first point of contact for a customer. But the sales guys don't care about that, all they care about are the numbers. The rest is for customer service to figure out.
The lesson I learned from watching the sales guys in action is that all things considered equal, the greater the volume of calls, the greater your success. Don't be emotionally involved in the outcome before it's necessary to do so - at the end of the day, you're just asking her to come for coffee with you, you're not asking her to marry you. The more people you ask to go for coffee, the more chance you'll find someone that's got nothing better to do than go for coffee with you - even if you do think they're out of your league (that's another concept I don't believe in, but that's for another day and another post).
Yes. Martin Seligman has done research (or at least reported the reasearch) on this and there is a full chapter about people doing cold calls in his "Learned Optimism" book.
I was shaking the first time I did it, and trying to direct the person to the email address for support. But I was a lot better the next time.
I wasn't assigned to it, I was just nearest the phone, and the phone was ringing and had to be answered, so I answered it.
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.
It was important to not be creepy, just friendly and withdraw if the situation became at all uncomfortable.
100% of the women he didn't ask did not give him his number. The exercise served the purpose of pushing him past the fear that would have otherwise paralyzed him during a real request.
Fear of rejection is fear of having what you already have, nothing (and maybe a bit of ridicule laid on top).
What he's really doing is using interaction with women as practice to be better at interaction with women.
I'm not really sure how else he should do it.
Maybe he could have established friendships with them, and "used" them even further?
"Mark Moschel - 30 Days of Rejection Therapy"
Presented at the 2013 Quantified Self Conference
Now that I'm thinking about it, opposite is probably the wrong word...it's more of the reverse. Whereas the man in the story is using the game to condition himself to learn that there's no (emotional) shock where one is expected, the dog trainers use exposure therapy to train dogs that there is a shock where one isn't expected. They're two sides of the same coin.
I wonder how often it is successful.
But I guess to your point, if that happened then structures of society would break down. Still, I'm not sure that would be a bad thing necessarily since at the very least we'd start being completely honest with one another. Kind of makes me thing of the movie The Invention Of Lying.
Your comment reminds me of myself when I used to claim marketing doesn't work on me, and that it even made me less likely to buy things. And then found out about the brown bag effect (a marketing technique which uses drab colors and minimal text to look non-flashy). Gamification isn't as developed a science as marketing, but it still works pretty well, and it's very unlikely that it doesn't work on you.
The key to motivation is to make a psychological bridge between things that you don't want to do and the emotional state that releases neurological chemicals that in turn make you feel happy.
Fair play to him though.
Coming out of any multi-year relationship is normally a shock to the system. The wonderful whiff of want is the fiercest anti-pheromone.
Also, a good tip, put a rug on the floor.
I thought maybe it was a quote, but google has only indexed this page for "wonderful whiff of want."
You coined a phrase, anyway!
I don't have much fear of rejection nowadays. I consistently choose the most difficult life decisions because I like challenges.
Everyone does that to some extent (including me) but there are many levels. Some people don't think even at the most trivial levels...
For example, if someone identifies as a 'Geek' - They will often convince themselves that they like Star Wars, Legos, Sci-Fi, comic books, etc... But in reality, they really never actually gave these topics any thought based on their own individual merits.
Maybe I'm an asshole, but I genuinely prefer to just sit alone and think about things than talk to people I find boring, even if they have yet another funny story about something to do with fishing that's slightly different than the others.
This isn't to say I don't go to the bar and chat up people in small time windows, I just don't bother to spend several hours talking to someone I don't find interesting.
I don't see why I should use my time that way.
Enjoying a challenge doesn't mean doing stuff you don't enjoy. You might like hanging out with people, but not everyone is the same. That's okay.
Sometimes the most difficult thing is to go out of our comfort zone. I'm guessing that's what you want to here from this community, and I'd say it's true. I did the same thing in high school, but I did have a core group of friends who got me (they didn't even attend my hs). My advice is to seek out people who's friendship will last beyond your current situation and who are easy for you to talk to. Difficult people to talk to are important but they aren't the ones we latch onto thought life.
Also, sometimes the hardest thing for me is to talk to people who I think are not as smart as I am, but everyone knows something you don't, even if that is what is fissionable. And who knows you might find someone with common interests, or who wants to talk to you about your game.
