The Rejection That Changed My Life
25+ Powerful Women on Being Let Down, Turning It Around, and Burning It Up at Work
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the groundbreaking author of Mistakes I Made at Work, comes the perfect book for anyone who needs inspiration after dealing with rejection, failure, or is searching for a new beginning in the workplace. Featuring fascinating interviews with more than twenty-five women, including Keri Smith, Angela Duckworth, and Roz Chast, The Rejection That Changed My Life provides an exciting new way to think about career challenges, changes, and triumphs.
Rejections don't go on your résumé, but they are part of every successful person's career. All of us will apply for jobs that we don't get and have ambitions that aren't fulfilled, because that is part of being a working person, part of pushing oneself to the next step professionally. While everyone deserves feel-better stories, women are more likely to ruminate, more likely to overthink rejection until it becomes even more painful—a situation that the women in this collection are determined to change, and in so doing, normalize rejection and encourage others to talk about it.
Empowering and full of heart, the stories in this collection are diverse in every sense, by top women from many cultural backgrounds and in a wide variety of fields; many of their hard-earned lessons are universal. There are stories from engineers, entrepreneurs, activists, comedians, professors, lawyers, chefs, and more on how they coped with rejection and even experienced it as a catalyst for their own personal professional growth. Powerful, motivating, and endlessly quotable and shareable, The Rejection That Changed My Life will become the go-to book for women at any stage of their career learning to navigate the workforce.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this encouraging handbook, Bacal (Mistakes I Made at Work), director of The Narratives Project for "habits of mind" at Smith College, shares stories of women professionals and their experiences with rejection and growth. One memorable story features a "kick-ass scientist who wears an outfit made out of rejection letters to her dissertation defense." In another, cartoonist Roz Chast confesses, "The weeks where I don't sell a cartoon, I still think, ‘They've finally learned how terrible I am and I'll never work again.'" In the weaker interviews, early rejections are viewed from the distance of an otherwise successful career and end up being unfortunately discouraging as they make rejection seem like a low hurdle to be easily overcome. The overarching lessons are to "see the experience of rejection, including our own reactions to it, as just data" and to practice receiving rejection "like a muscle." While Bacal's tips are helpful, her message of normalizing setbacks comes across most powerfully in a conclusion considering universal themes of struggle and renewal. This affirming compilation will make a good gift for early-career women seeking to find their footing.
