There was a time in my life when nothing seemed to go right.

I had just finished my master’s degree and was searching for a new career direction. On paper, I thought I looked great: an engineering degree, some work experience, and now a business master’s. Who wouldn’t want to hire me?

Apparently, almost everyone.

Month after month, I sent applications into the black hole of online recruitment portals. I imagined my CV floating somewhere in another dimension of the space-time continuum. Maybe I got the job in a parallel universe.  I was getting donuts in this one

I don’t remember a particular rejection email. They all coalesced into a blur. What I remember is the feeling.

Each rejection pulled at an old thread of insecurity I thought I had outgrown. I had done the study, collected the qualifications, tried to make myself more employable. Yet here I was, still waiting for someone to decide I was worth a conversation.

After a while, I began supplying my own explanation for the silence. I wasn’t good enough. Nobody needed to say it. I could do that part myself.

When we submit an application, pitch an idea or share something we’ve made, we put ourselves within reach of someone else’s judgement. We may understand that they are assessing a particular piece of work. It can still feel as though they have assessed us in our entirety.

Screenwriter Brian Koppelman tells a story about promoting Tracy Chapman while he was at college. Audiences responded to her music. Record executives could recognise her talent and still struggle to imagine signing her. Their objections included her race, her appearance and how different she was from the artists they knew how to sell.

There was a gap between what people experienced when they heard her and what the industry believed it could do with her.. A gatekeeper’s judgement comes with assumptions about what an audience wants, what success looks like and what risks are worth taking. Those assumptions can be wrong. They can also carry prejudices that familiarity has made respectable or routine

But there is a temptation in stories like this. We know how Chapman’s story turned out. It is easy to borrow that ending for ourselves. Perhaps everyone rejecting us is also failing to recognise something exceptional.

Perhaps. But perhaps, we should leave room for other explanations. Our work might need improving. We might lack the experience a role requires. An idea that excites us might solve a problem nobody else cares enough about. Someone can understand what we are offering and still decline it.

Protecting ourselves from rejection by declaring every critic mistaken leaves us with very little room to learn. The difficulty is staying willing to listen when the thing we hear might hurt.

In that interview, Koppelman speaks about evaluating the reasons for rejection dispassionately. If the criticism has merit, address it. If it doesn’t, you can leave it alone.

Sensible advice. Harder to practise when you have just been turned down for something you wanted. I think we need to allow ourselves the first reaction. Disappointment, embarrassment, anger. Taking criticism seriously doesn’t require pretending it hasn’t affected us.

Then, when we can, we need to examine what we actually know. Did someone identify a weakness I can work on? Have other people noticed the same thing? Does this person understand the work and the people it is intended for?

Or have I received a generic email and filled in everything else myself?

That was often what happened with my applications. I knew I hadn’t progressed. I rarely knew why. Yet I treated the outcome as confirmation of something much larger.

A rejection can contain useful information. Silence usually contains much less than we imagine. The work is to take whatever signal is available without absorbing the shame. It requires enough honesty to admit that we may need to improve, and enough care for ourselves to keep that admission within its proper limits.

I can be wrong about an idea. I can be unsuitable for a job. There are things I haven’t learned yet.

How much of my life should any one of those facts be allowed to explain?

Eventually, I stopped applying for jobs altogether.

I took a part-time role to pay the bills and began attending meetups that caught my curiosity. At first it was anything and everything that even slightly tickled my fancy. Eventually it was Startups, technology, social impact that really energised me. I started showing up in those rooms where people were making things and figuring things out.

Then I showed up again. And again

Over time, I became a familiar face. We had something to pick up from the last conversation. I could ask what had happened with an idea someone was working on. They could ask what I’d been reading.

Somewhere in that process, I became interested in design thinking. Something about it appealed to me. I read a few books and began thinking about how I might use what I was learning. I got talking to a founder. Drawing on that reading, I came up with a customer acquisition strategy for his business.

He gave me a part-time job. There was no grand reinvention behind it. I had followed an interest, learned something and found an opportunity to make it useful.

Looking back, I can see how different that was from sending another application. A CV had to explain where I’d been and persuade someone to imagine what I might do next. In those conversations, we could explore a real problem together. The founder had a chance to see how I thought.

And I had a chance to discover work I wanted to do.

I went on to volunteer, work with startups and eventually co-found my own business and the disruptive business network.  The direction emerged gradually, through people, interests and opportunities I hadn’t known to search for.

I am careful now about saying rejection was good for me. That period was painful. I would have preferred a shorter version of it, with fewer applications and considerably less self-doubt.

I also don’t know whether the employers who passed on me were wrong. Some probably had better candidates. Some may have struggled to understand where I fitted. Most gave me too little information to know.

What changed was how I went looking for work. I found places where I could participate, learn and contribute while people got to know me. That opened possibilities I hadn’t found through applications.

It won’t be the answer to every rejection. Sometimes we need to improve the work and try again. Sometimes we need to find a different audience. Sometimes we need to stop pursuing something that is costing more than we can afford. Discernment takes more effort than either blaming ourselves or blaming the people who said no.

My relationship with rejection is still ongoing. I still want the things I put into the world to be wanted. I still feel the disappointment when they aren’t.

But I try to be more precise about what has happened. Someone has declined a particular offer, application or piece of work. I can look at it again. I can seek better feedback. I can decide what to change and whether to continue.

For now, that is enough to work with.