Rejection Is A Bug

A New Approach

It wasn’t so long ago that the sting of rejection took me out for weeks.

After previously only working at bootstrapped startups, I landed my first role at a public company. I was used to pushing code and getting very little feedback. But here the standards were much higher. I would spend days in code review. Finding every which way to push it through my co-worker. Bristling with frustration at the injustice.

But sometimes when I would do this, things would break in production, and I would be frantically fixing things late in the evening with no one around to support.

So I started to listen to and address all the feedback religiously. Adapting my code. Making it more robust. Little by little, things got better. Code review cycles shortened. Defects dropped.

This pattern repeated itself throughout my career and into entrepreneurship. Each time, the same feelings would surface. Always surprising to meet them again.

But I learned to treat it as data.

The thing is, engineers already know how to do this. We do it every day with our code. A test fails, and we don’t take it personally. We read the output, trace the problem, fix the variable, and run it again. We understand that failure is part of the process. It’s how the system improves.

But the moment the rejection is personal, a pitch that doesn’t land, a customer who says no, a cold message that gets left on read, that same brain that debugs flawlessly goes into a completely different mode.

Shame.

Withdrawal.

“I wasn’t ready.”

The input changed. The logic didn’t.

Try running the same process. A customer said no. What was the input? A cold LinkedIn message with no context, sent to someone who had never heard of you.

What output did you expect? Why? What would you change on the next run?

Most of the time, when you actually trace it back, the rejection wasn’t a verdict on you or your product. It was a data point about a specific input that didn’t match the expected output. That’s it. That’s all it was.

The founders I’ve seen break through the sales wall are no less sensitive than the ones who stay stuck. They feel the same sting. They’ve just built a better failure loop. They collect the data, adjust the variable, and run the test again faster than the feeling can take hold.

The best engineers I know have high defect rates early in a new environment. They also have the lowest defect rates once they’ve been there a while.

Because they don’t take rejection personally.

They rejoice in the new data.