Among many other reasons that make sense, there is a master reason to welcome rejection instead of trying to avoid it: Because it’s inevitable.

Rejection is one possible outcome for every action you take. Yes, it’s best to expect a positive outcome and do everything feasible to make it happen. However, math, common sense and reasonable experience equally point to the potential of rejection.

There are other practical motives to consider rejection as a normal option in the process of making progress.

Firstly, should you accept it’s possible, you’ll not be taken by surprise when it happens. Accepting the possibility doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do everything to generate a positive result and having a winning attitude.

Basically, it allows you to keep your cool and focused mind in the driver seat, instead of diverting your energy towards thinking about the aftermath of rejection.

Think of focus like a very powerful laser beam that you can apply to one issue, at the time. And we all have a limited number of charges for a given timeframe. It takes time to recharge the focus beam. So make it count.

Another powerful reason to consider rejection welcomed is that it’s a healthy stepping stone on your improvement path. Imagine it as a quality checkpoint on a factory assembly line. It gives you valuable insights on how to improve, become more efficient, and adjust.

Furthermore, the only way you can get better at anything is simply to do more iterations, assess each one, see what you need to fix/adjust/improve and do it again. I call this “The Mad Scientist Approach”(Please don’t forget to celebrate each and every small win, in between.)

Although it’s not based on statistically relevant research, but mainly on a vast empirical experience both of myself and thousands of other people I know and worked with, I’ll say this: I don’t know any human being who pursued any goal that did not experience rejection on their journey.

On a slightly different note, when you’re trying to avoid rejection, you’re actually postponing any other kind of potential result for your action, therefore you’re also postponing a potentially positive outcome.

Let me paint this through a simple example that I encountered many times when working with clients.

One is trying to launch a new business/product/expand/etc. Of course, there are two major potential outcomes, with various degrees of differences between them: success and rejection/failure.

A commonly asked question that supports postponing the results (both positive and negative)

But what if my product will not be good enough and I’ll get rejected by the target market?

Potential answer: Unless you can either travel into the future or predict it with utmost precision, there is no useful answer to that. It’s just talking, and talking can’t alter the future. Only actions have this power.

Nobody knows what will happen in the future. Period.

I’ll draw the conclusion with a quote from the great stoic Marcus Aurelius

“It’s time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet.” – Marcus Aurelius