Beta Life Series – How to Reject Rejection

Beta Life Series – How to Reject Rejection

Beta Life Series

How to Reject Rejection

Samuel Osho

When Colonel Harlan Sanders hit the streets with his pressure cooker and unique recipe for cooking Southern fried chicken, he was rejected 300 times before he found someone that believed in his dream. A testimony of his triumph over 300 rejections is evident in over 22,500 KFC restaurants in 136 countries. 
 
If you are going to be successful in life, you must be able to handle rejection. Most importantly, don’t take it personal and retreat into resentment and self-pity. 

You get rejected when you don’t get the promotion you wanted; you don’t get the job you applied for, you don’t get the raise you want so badly, you don’t get a date you requested or get fired. 

Rejection is a part of the cycle that makes life what it is. 

What should be your default response to rejection? 
As rightly put by the authors of Chicken Soup for the Soul, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen: “When someone says no, you say ‘Next!'” 

To be honest, you must realize that it is a numbers game; there are over 7 billion people on the planet! Someone somewhere is waiting to say yes. All you need to do is move on.

Your idea got turned down, not you. Your manuscript was rejected, not you. 

You must believe that nothing is wrong with you. Maybe you need to work better on that proposal application or spend more time on that manuscript or acquire more skills before you ask for a raise.  

But I must tell you that it has nothing to do about you. 

Did I just hear you say, “Next!”?

That should be your new motto.  

Beta Life Series – Go Back to the Basics

Beta Life Series – Go Back to the Basics

Beta Life Series

Go Back to the Basics

Samuel Osho

Why bother about the union between a noun and an adjective when you don’t know what a verb looks like? 

How can you create lovely sounds when you can’t differentiate musical notes?

There is a reason why we started our journey in kindergarten. 

Kindergarten (German) means children’s garden. A garden captures the journey of a seed into tiny flowers in a nursery pot.  

In the garden, seeds are nourished, nurtured and nursed until they are ready for the unpredictable clime of the forest. 

In kindergarten, you learnt the basics. From alphabets to numbers to drawings to speech; all layers of the human faculty were stirred and engaged by seemingly simple tasks. 

Kindergarten so important and that’s why it’s at the base. Yes, it precedes everything else. 

We learn the alphabets before creating sentences.

We learn how to make bricks before we build. 

We learn logic before we start to code. 

If there is anything so important that deserves your steadied focus all the time – it is learning the basics.  

Everything can go wrong when you ignore the basics, you can’t perform at your best. 

Of what importance is the height of a skyscraper with a faulty base, it is going to collapse anyway. 

So, why not take some time and focus on the basics. 

When you master the basics, you can do exploits and replicate success. 

It’s easy to dream about being the world’s best musician when you know how the musical notes work.

And knowing nouns, verbs, and adjectives even in their disguised apparels can make a hell of a writer out of you. 

Go back to the basics. 

Beta Life Series – Why Your Passion Matters

Beta Life Series – Why Your Passion Matters

Beta Life Series

Why Your Passion Matters

Samuel Osho

 A few years ago, “a passionate writer” dropped this question on Twitter for J.K. Rowling:

“What if the passionate writer is broke and can’t afford a MacBook Air?” 

And here comes Rowling’s iconic response: 

“I wrote first two Potters (Harry Potter Book) by hand and typed them on a 10-year-old typewriter. All a writer needs is talent and ink.” 

 

You must have heard countless chatters about a passion for A and J but there are no results to back up the evidence of their passion. 

Does this sound familiar? 

“Oh! All I need to be a superb photographer is a new DSLR camera.” 

The camera shows up, and nothing happens. 

“All I need is a standard microphone and I will start my podcast.” 

You got the microphone as a birthday gift, but you are yet to record a sample podcast show with it.

Passion expresses itself through drives and desires. It’s a fire; you can’t hide it; it burns and consumes everything in its path. As the tender flame glows and grows, everyone can see if it’s a blue or a red flame. 

If you are looking for excuses not to get the work done, you will find one. We often use a lack of specific tools as embroidery for our excuses. 

It’s time to stop looking for a MacBook Air before you get that book done, if you think about it enough, you will find hundreds of alternatives to get the job done. 

 

It’s great if you have the tools but it has often been observed that what stops us from becoming productive is necessary not lack of tools but an absence of passion and drive. 

Let your passion take the wheels and drive you to the finish line. And if passion can’t get the job done, you should add lots of discipline.

Beta Life – Find Yourself

Beta Life – Find Yourself

Beta Life Series

Find Yourself

Samuel Osho

What makes me happy?

What am I good at?

What things do I value in life?

If you have perfect answers to these questions, then this is not for you.

 

In this pool of information overload, how do you prepare yourself for the vicissitudes of life?  

You read twelve books a day? 

Listen to twenty podcasts a week? 

Increase your “net worth” by adding famous people to your network? 

Take twenty online courses a month? 

No, find yourself first. Yes, just like Socrates said, “Know thyself.”  

You are such a big and beautiful encyclopedia that needs to be digested and understood. If you fail to uncap the diverse complexities that make you a unique being, everything else you do might be of no significant impact.

The age-long questions of self-discovery stare at us all the time. But, we can use Rudyard Kipling’s six honest serving men – What, Why, When, How, Where and Who, to untangle knots of enigmas. 

With these men and their shovels, you can dig deeper into the core of your being; you can uncover hidden treasures, and chart pathways into new lands.

 

Books are superb, podcasts are of great benefit, networking is noteworthy, and online courses are superchargers, but if you don’t know who you are, you are a ball in a spinning wheel. You will go everywhere the wheel directs you and ends up a dead ball when the wheel stops. 

Start with these three free resources:  

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