I’m reading Julien Smith’s free e-book The Flinch right now. Early in the book, he says:
In a fight, there is a fundamental difference between boxers and everyone else. The guys who have trained are different. If you hit them, they don’t flinch. It takes practice to get there, but if you want to fight, you have no choice. It’s the only way to win.
People who are in the business of creating and communicating get punched a lot. When you put something out there day after day, every week, year in and year out, a lot of it’s going to be rejected.
When something of yours gets rejected, you have to get up and go right back in swinging. Over and over, trying to do better, be smarter, be faster, last longer, trying again and again to land one.
To succeed, and not be a miserable wreck while you’re trying, you have to learn to take a punch. And I have to tell you, the best way to do that is to get punched a lot.
After a while you realize that your career doesn’t end when something of yours gets smacked down. In fact, you can learn something useful from each experience. It makes you better at what you do.
So put your ideas and pitches and words and images out there, and take some risks.
NOTE: If at some point this book advises me to actually go out there and get into a fistfight, I will let you know how it turns out.
Cross-posted to the Weber Shandwick Seattle blog. Photo by Generation Bass, licensed under Creative Commons