Build Your Creative Resilience With The Rejection You Receive

Build Your Creative Resilience With The Rejection You Receive

Trying to be creative and think outside of the box won’t always go in your favour. Rejection will knock you down constantly, but that rejection is your training for developing strong creative endurance.

Photo by Adam Swank

Often you’ll experience rejection for wanting to try something new. Illustrator Jessica Olien at Slate explains how rejection should become your friend and not an enemy:

Perhaps for some people, the pain of rejection is like the pain of training for a marathon — training the mind for endurance. Research shows you’ll need it. Truly creative ideas take a very long time to be accepted. The better the idea, the longer it might take. Even the work of Nobel Prize winners was commonly rejected by their peers for an extended period of time.

Most people agree that what distinguishes those who become famously creative is their resilience.

The key is to keep pushing forward. For creativity and innovation to flourish, persistence is necessary. Everybody that has created something great has endured the gauntlet of rejection. Toughen up and hold on to your ideas tight, because you’re about to run a marathon. If you really believe it’s worth it, you’ll fight onward, and every rejection will just be another stepping stone along the way.

We Say We Like Creativity, But We Really Don’t [Slate via 99U]


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