He was so inspired by this visit by Bill Gates that he had made this pledge. He literally wrote this letter to his parents at age 13, basically saying, “By the time I’m age 30, I’m going to buy Microsoft. I’m going to own the biggest company in the world and all the stuff that was going to be very inspiring.”

Fast forward to where he’s at now working as this marketing director, then he was just like, what happened to that boy, like, what am I doing here? I need to be an entrepreneur. I need to go off and do these inspiring things in my life. And that’s kind of how he starts off the book. And the reason he wasn’t doing that stuff is because he was scared and had all this fear of rejection.

Stig Brodersen  4:56  

I just wanted to piggyback on what you said here at the end. That was the reason why he didn’t start a company, and there was not…because he was liking ideas. He had a ton of ideas. He had a ton of drive. He was really well-connected. It was not a problem about that at all. 

It was basically because every time he pitched an idea, whether it was to a family member or perhaps to a future client, and someone particularly says no, which is what happens whenever you’re an entrepreneur. You get to meet a lot of no’s.

So, he had a long chat with his wife, Tracy about this. She could see that he was miserable at his job. So even though she was pregnant with their first child, she actually asked him to take six months off to start a company, and really to follow that dream. 

He actually came up with an app on how to keep promises. It’s not super important to the story, but it actually sounds really funny. That was kind of like his business idea, and it worked out pretty well. 

He had a team around him, and after four months, they actually had this really important meeting with this investor, and it was really a make it or break it pitch. [It’s] like, if they could convince this investor, they would get enough money to keep doing this for years and really get this app out in the world. 

Also, you probably guess what already happened, he was rejected. He was just ready to quit. He spent four months on this. He had no drive, and he was just so discouraged. So what happened was, his wife told him that he only spent four months. [She said,] “You still have two months to figure out what to do with [your] life and perhaps to start a new company.” And that’s really when the book gets exciting.

Preston Pysh  6:37  

So, I got to applaud his wife, because how many wives would say, “Okay, you got six months to do this.” And then, after four months, he just totally fails and falls on his face trying to build an app. 

Most wives would be saying, “You need to get back to work and start making some money, Dude.” And that’s not what his wife said. She said, “Yeah, well, you got two more months left. What in the world are you doing, man? Come on, let’s see you make this company.” So, I love that. 

He goes out there, and he realizes at this point, after this next failure that every time he’s confronted with this no decision. He just got back from this investor that said, “No, I’m not going to invest in your app, and sorry, Dude. I don’t have anything else for you.” 

So, he’s getting these rejections, and he just doesn’t know how to handle this. The fears [are] building every one of these scenarios. He does a great job describing how he feels during these scenarios in his life.

And so, he starts researching online like anyone would do, like, how do I overcome this fear of rejection? And he reads this post from some random person on the internet that says, “Sometimes the best medicine for rejection is to just go out and ask people if you can do some crazy things for them where you’re just guaranteed to get a ‘no.’ That you’re going to get rejected, so that you can experience what it’s like to be rejected more often, and you basically become desensitized to it.” 

And so, not only does he decide to actually act on this idea that this guy has to go out and get rejected a bunch of times, so you’ll be desensitized. But he decides to document it on video, and then upload the videos on YouTube. With no audience, no following, no nothing. He’s just going to create a blog about being rejected. And he’s going to do this a bunch of times, so he goes out. 

Do you remember what the first one was? I don’t even remember what the first one was. What was it, Stig?

Stig Brodersen  8:28  

Yeah, the first one that was to ask a random person if he could borrow $100. He was pretty sure that he would be rejected if he did that.

Preston Pysh  8:35  

So he’s walking out of his office space where he was building the apps. And he passes the janitorial person who’s there at the front of the building. And he’s like, working up all this courage to ask and he’s just hoping that he says no, so he can hurry up and get out of there. So yeah, he asks, can I have $100? And the guy just looked at him and said, “No,” and then, he just ran away and that was it. 

So, he had this on video, which was really neat, because he talks about [it]: “Because I had it on video, I could watch and see the fear in my face.” He was studying himself. He was asking himself: “Why am I so scared of this?” And he’s looking at how the other person’s reacting and he’s like watching the whole experience over again. 

And the thing that he learned after this first scenario was: Why did I run away so fast? Why didn’t I just stick around and ask him more questions or try to maybe massage it a different way to maybe get to a yes. But he just [got] up and ran out the door.

Stig Brodersen  9:36  

Whenever he watched the tape afterwards, he actually discovered that the person he was asking, he was asking: Why? He actually gave him a chance to alter his opinion. [It was] like this stranger comes in, and you’re asking for $100. That might be an emergency or something like that. 

But he said no, because you typically won’t give out $100 to a stranger, but he still again gave him a reason to elaborate on that, but he didn’t hear that. He didn’t even hear that because he just wanted to get his “No,” and he just wanted to get out of there. That was a really interesting discovery for him.

Preston Pysh  10:10  

So, let’s fast forward. He goes to the third one that he did. He’s on a journey to do 100 of these, and blog the whole thing. And so, the third one that he did, he was going to go to a Krispy Kreme. And he was going to ask the manager of a Krispy Kreme if they could arrange some donuts in a box in the shape of the Olympic symbol, like the five circles with the various colors. 

In his mind, this is a no-brainer. There’s no way they’re ever going to do this. So let me go ask them. So he goes up, and he’s like, videoing this. And he asked the manager. He said, “Hello, can you build me some donuts in the shape of the Olympics symbol?” And the manager, I think her name, what was her name, Jackie? I can’t remember. 

Stig Brodersen  10:59  

Yeah. 

Preston Pysh  11:00  

Okay, so Jackie looks at him. And she said, “Well,” and she’s contemplating it, and I’ve watched this video since reading the book. And Stig, did you watch the video? I’m just curious.

Stig Brodersen  11:12  

Yeah, I watched the video. We’ll definitely put it in the show notes.

Preston Pysh  11:15  

Yeah, we’ll find some of these videos, and we’ll put them in the show notes, so if you guys want to watch this stuff, go to our show notes. It’ll all be in there. 

So, I watched the video, and she’s just there. You can see she’s just like contemplating, like, “Well, maybe I could do that.” She just didn’t say no. And so, he’s just kind of flabbergasted at this point. He just cannot believe that somebody is about to do this. And they’re actually going to say yes. 

And so, it takes them like 15 minutes or something and they’re back there. They make the donuts, and they bring up to him, and he’s like looking at the donuts, and they’re literally arranged in this Olympic symbol with all the right colors and everything. And he is just blown away. Like this moment was totally life-altering for him because he realized sometimes you’re going to get a yes, even if it’s a crazy request. 

Also, there’s people out there that are good people that are just genuinely trying to help you. And so this was such a game changer for him at this point because he went in there fully expecting a no. And he got exactly the opposite of what he expected.

Stig Brodersen  12:18  

It was even better than that, Preston, as far as I remember it. She actually gave it to him for free. 

Preston Pysh  12:23  

Yeah, yeah, you’re right. 

Stig Brodersen  12:25  

Because it was just a good experience for her. Whenever you watch the video, it’s just like an emotional video because you just become so happy seeing these two people that don’t know each other, helping each other out. 

He’s just so relieved that he’s actually getting a yes. And she’s just so happy that she can meet his somewhat odd request. And the best thing I guess is that this video went viral. I mean, the following days, millions and millions of views, and I think he was even interviewed for TV. She was, too.

Preston Pysh  12:54  

Yeah, so let’s rewind real fast. 

So, he quit his job, which was a high paying job. I don’t know what lifestyle they had, but I’m sure that they were living decently working for Fortune 500 companies. So, he quits that. He then takes whatever savings he has and builds this team. He had office space. He’s building his team around making an app on iTunes. 

For four months, he’s spending through all those dollars, and he gets denied and falls flat on his face. Now, he’s going to start a blog about rejection. He has zero followers. And on the third video he uploads, this thing goes viral. He’s getting on all sorts of TV shows, and everyone wants to find out what in the world is this. And why did this lady make these out of just pure human kindness; make these things. And that was a start and that’s what gave him this whole platform. And now, that’s his entire job; just talking about being rejection-proof. He’s got this book, which is [a] top selling business book; [a] bestseller on Amazon. 

So, man, what a change one little thing can make. And he did it by trying to discover his fear and understand what it was that was driving him to have this fear. And what an amazing journey. 

Now, as we go through the rest of the book, he provides many more stories. So, let me give you an example of another story in the book. He goes up to some random guy’s house. This was in Texas, and the Dallas Cowboys are playing. And literally, the gentleman comes to the door and he rings some random person’s door, fully expecting to get in though, and he has his soccer cleats with him and a soccer ball. 

He says, “Excuse me, can I play soccer in your backyard, and can you videotape me doing it?” You know, “Nope,” I know [is] what I would say if somebody came to my house and said that. “Get the hell out of here,” but that’s not the response he actually got from this gentleman, and he has this stuff on video. 

So the guy said, “Yeah,” and he brought him in. He literally let them go in his backyard, kick a soccer ball around, and he videotaped them. He had no clue who this guy was. And so, going back to Stig’s point after that very first encounter where the guy was asking why. Whenever he started getting rejected, he came up with this approach of trying to understand why he was rejected. 

And this was a very liberating part of becoming rejection-proof because when you ask that “why,” it puts to bed all of those thoughts that are running around in your head of why you thought the person has rejected you and why they said no. 

Because what he found was that, most of the time, whatever he thought the reason was, he was wrong. And whenever he understood why people were saying no, then he could adjust his approach and try the same experiment over again, like, if he was told no, well, the perfect example is, let me give you this other one. 

So he goes and says that he’s going to plant, was it a flower or like a bush or something? He’s going to plant a flower in a person’s yard. He’s just going to go up, ring the doorbell, and say, “Can I please plant this flower in your yard?” 

And so, he goes up to the first person, and he asked this person, “Can I plant a flower in your yard?” And the person says, “No, you can’t.” And he says, “Well, sir, can I ask you why? Because I’m not charging anything. I’m doing this for free. It’s just a nice kind act.” The gentleman says, my dog will come up and eat the flowers off, and I don’t want him to do that, so that’s the reason why I said no. 

And he said, not only that, but “The girl right across the street, she really likes flowers. Why don’t you go over and ask her? I guarantee she’ll let you plant this in her yard.” And so, what did he do? He walks across the street. He rings the doorbell. He asked the girl, “Can I plant flowers in your yard?” And she says, “Absolutely, I would love that.”

And so, by him asking the question, “Why?”, at the end of the rejection, turned out to be just a monumental change in the way that he understood what was happening because now he would have walked away from that gentleman’s house and had been, “It must have been the way I looked or the clothes I was wearing, or I’m just weird, or any of those things is what a common person would think.” 

I know myself personally, that would have been one of the last reasons I would have thought that a person would say no, “I don’t want a flower plant in my yard because the dog would come out and eat the petals.” I would have never thought of that. But you don’t know that until you ask the question. And that was a major learning point; a big turning point for him.

Stig Brodersen  17:19  

I really like that you bring that up. He actually experienced that somewhat later with Southwest Airlines. Because one thing was to get a rejection from one person, a sales clerk or knocking on some people’s door, as unpleasant as it might be, he had this idea that it’s probably a lot more unpleasant to be rejected in front of hundreds of people. 

So actually, what he did was he asked the steward at Southwest Airlines if he could read the safety announcement, and he was told, no. And then, as Preston just mentioned, he immediately asked, I don’t want to be disrespectful in any way, but sir, can I please ask why I can’t read the safety announcement? 

And so, the steward says, it’s actually required by law that someone who is trained that will do that. But what I can do for you is to give you the chance to say, “Welcome!” to the passengers, because that’s not required by law for a trained person to do so. So, he actually did that. 

Also, he just needed to come up with something fast and realistic thinking on his feet. And he just said, welcome to Southwest Airlines. I really like flying with this airline because the staff is always so friendly, and I always get good food when I’m traveling with this company, so why don’t we just all applaud the staff? And it actually turned out to be a really, really good experience, not just for him and for the staff, but also for the passengers. 

And none of that would have happened if he didn’t ask why. The thing is, that, rejection that we’re talking about now should not be confused with failure. Especially if you’re an entrepreneur, it seems like a lot of failures is almost like a badge of honor for a lot of people like, “Oh, I fail a lot;” like you hear all these inspirational quotes from these billionaires about you should just fail and you should just fail upwards, meaning you should just improve yourself every time you make a mistake. I think all that is definitely true, and I think that there’s a lot of good things to say about that. 

But rejection is somewhat different. If it’s a rejection, it’s tied to your personality one way or another, or your culture, your looks, basically everything. And that also relates back to what you said before, Preston, about if you just had taken your no at face value. He’ll be like, “Is it the way I look? Is it the way I talk?” It’s probably why I was rejected. But not at all. It was because of a dog.

Preston Pysh  19:44  

So there’s a bunch of examples that he talks about. And what we’re going to do is at the end, we’re going to cover what we think are some of the real big points that we learned from these hundred scenarios where he was rejected and where he was actually given the things that he had asked for. 

Something that was interesting as you go through these hundred rejections that he talks about. He doesn’t talk about every one of them in the book, if you’re wondering. He talks about the more entertaining ones. But he talks about this journey that he has and the things that he’s learning along the way. 

One of the key things that I picked apart from this was the mindset, the way that he approached things. He started to actually have fun with some of this stuff, even though he fully knew that he was going to be rejected. He started having a positive mindset in the way that he was approaching this. He’d go up, he’d ask the question. 

Early on, it was like this big emotional thing, and then it shifted to, let me ask the question, and then let me see how I can maneuver from that point. How can I take advantage of whatever the opportunities present itself after the question is asked? That really became quite interesting. 

He gave this amazing scenario. This amazing encounter in his life. When he was at Duke University, he talks about an individual that he had met there that he was very inspired by. The individual’s name is Scott Smiley. Scott Smiley went to school with him there, but Scott was on a hiatus from the army. 

He was a military officer. He still is a military officer. And Scott Smiley, in 2005, he lost his vision when a suicide car bomber blew himself up 30 meters from where Scott’s Stryker vehicle was at. So Scott is blind. And what he found was that although Scott was blind, and could have taken this [as a] very negative vantage point on life, [but] actually the exact opposite has happened. 

So Scott, since that event has surfed in Hawaii, he’s skied Vail. He’s skydived. He’s climbed Mount Rainier. He completed a triathlon. He’s graduated from Duke University with his MBA. He has won an ESPY Award for Best Outdoor Athlete, and this is what I’m so excited to say here on the podcast, I am really good friends with Scott Smiley. 

In fact, Scott Smiley and myself, we both went to West Point together, we were classmates. And when I first showed up at West Point, they put you through this thing called beast barracks. And it’s your first summer there, where it’s just miserable and horrible. 

What they do is they put everyone that shows up into a squad. And the squads are usually about eight to nine people. And for that first summer, I was in the same squad with seven other people, with Scott Smiley. 

And so, I knew Scott before any of this happened. And I can tell you, Scott Smiley is such an incredible person, and he was such an incredible person before this event ever happened. And I can honestly say, I am so humbled and honored to know him. 

And whenever I was reading this book, and he was mentioned, I was just so deeply honored. Just to quickly help promote Scott’s stuff. So Scott has a book the name of the book is, “Hope Unseen.” It talks about that his entire journey, and most importantly, it talks about how you can take a positive spin and accomplish just enormous things in your life, even after it might feel like the whole world has just flipped against you. 

And so, just a classic example of what he’s talking about by going through all this rejection and all these examples. I’m so happy that he brought up Scott Smiley because his story and his book is so phenomenal. I can’t help promote that enough. We’ll have some pictures of Scott and some things about that also in our show notes if people are interested in checking that out, but huge shout out for Jia Jian to mention Scott in the book.

Stig Brodersen  23:40  

Wow, thank you so much, Preston for telling that personal story about Scott. That’s definitely very inspiring. 

So this part and time of the show, let’s jump to the very end of the book where there’s this really touching story about what you would like to do for his final and epic rejection. So please go ahead, Preston.

Preston Pysh  24:01  

Alright, so at this point, he had a pretty big blog platform. He had a lot of people following him, and people were trying to make this hundredth thing very huge. And so, they wanted him to try to interview Obama. All these different things that are probably pretty easy to ask and get rejected on, but where it came back to was he wanted to do something that wasn’t necessarily a crowd pleaser, or something that was for everyone else. 

He wanted to do something that was really personal to him. And it was all about his wife who gave him the opportunity to keep going on and discovering this hidden talent that he had with blogging and capturing an audience. 

And so, he asked his wife a simple question. He said, “If you could work anywhere, where would it be?” So his wife responded, “Well, that’s pretty easy. I would like to work for Google.” And so, he’s like, “Oh, okay, well then, let’s make that our last rejection challenge, and we can try to get you a job at Google. And if it’s successful, then you just won your dream job.” 

He set aside six months to pull this off, and that they were going to be persistent. They were going to continue to try to pull this off to get her hired at Google, and this is such a great story. So, they start off and they start networking. And what they did is they said, “What are the things that we control? What is in our control in order to make this happen?” 

They started listing the things out. “Well, we can network. We can shine up your resume. We can do all these things.” They listed out the things that they control. Then they said, “Well, what is it that we don’t control?” And they said, “Well, we can’t control whether somebody says yes or no. We can’t control how many people are willing to take an interview.” And they listed out all those things. 

And then, as they went down this journey, and they were trying to achieve this thing of getting hired at Google, just so you guys know, in the book, he says getting hired at Google is 200 times harder than getting into Harvard. Just to kind of give people an idea of how difficult it is to get hired at Google. Extremely difficult. So, they started going down this path. They started getting a lot of rejections. They did start meeting a lot of people that got her interviews, and they went through all of this. 

And every time that they came upon yet another rejection, they said, “Okay, was this one of the things that we could control? Is this one of the things that we can improve upon? Or is this something that’s completely out of our control?” And when that was something that they could improve, they did. 

They worked towards fine tuning that and they asked the questions: Why? How can I fix this? What is in control here? So, they continued to optimize is really what they were doing. And they didn’t let any rejection get in their way. 

At the end, she sat down. She actually got flown out to Silicon Valley. This is probably, I don’t know, five rejections later. She finally got somebody that said, “Well, we’re interested in interviewing you.” They flew her out to Silicon Valley. She sat down. She had the interview. She came back. She said, “I think that went really well.” And as people might suspect, she got a call and the call said, “We’re sorry. We’re not going to take you.” 

And so, her response back to that was, she was disappointed, but you know what, [she said,] “Hey, no problem. I really appreciate the time that you guys offered. I really appreciate the interview, and I’m humbled to be here,” and just took it really well. 

Well, lo and behold, a couple weeks later, she gets another callback. And it’s Google and they said, “We would like to offer you that position that we originally declined you for.” And she asked the question, “Why?”

They said, “Well, we all just really liked you a lot. Everyone in the room that was interviewing you really liked you. And we just didn’t necessarily feel like you were a fit and had the credentials or whatever to fill this specific role. But then, as we started looking at other applicants, when we started looking more, we realized that we hadn’t found anyone and we still were thinking about you. So, the job is yours if you still want it.” And of course, she took it, and they moved to Silicon Valley. 

So I loved the end of this book because it was his wife that gave him this opportunity. It was his wife that basically said, “Hey, I want you to quit your job, to jump out there, and to go after this dream that you have,” and really gave him that gift. 

In the end, he was able to give the gift back to his own spouse through everything that he had learned through this entire journey. And so, what I love about this is because often in life, the gift that we give to other people is the gift that we’re actually giving ourselves in the long run. And it might not play out tomorrow. It might not play out a week later. 

But for Jia Jiang, that’s exactly what played out in his life. His wife gave him this amazing gift to go after it, and in the end, his wife ended up receiving the gift that she gave through a job. In that whole process, Jia learned just tremendous things. And now, he’s sharing it with the world. 

I’m telling you, folks, this book is so flipping good. We definitely did it no justice with our discussion today. When you read this, it is so well written. The stories are hilarious. You’re going to learn a ton. I was very happy with this book.

Stig Brodersen  29:27  

He also gives people a lot of good takeaways that you can actually use in your personal life. I’ll just take the opportunity to mention a few of them briefly here at this point in time of the show. 

So, one of the things that he learned was that you can ask the same question and come up with very different answers. And it’s not only a question of how you position yourself and like how you appear and like the tone you’re asking it in. It’s also acknowledging that a rejection is merely just an opinion. And it’s not so much you as asking another person for a favor or request or what it might be, it’s on the receiving end. 

The rejection that you get is really just an opinion because it might be the mood that they’re in today. It might be the upbringing. It might be their own experiences. 

Another thing that he talks about, and this is actually a learning outcome that he has from Robert Cialdini, [who] we also interviewed on this podcast, is that whenever you get a “no,” ask for a smaller favor. And the reason why that works is that people actually don’t like to reject you. I mean, it’s not in human nature, just to keep rejecting people. 

Very few people are unpleasant people. Very, very often there’s a good reason why people would say no, so always have two requests in mind. Like you might have the big one. You might be rejected, but very often when you ask for a second favor, you’ll get a yes. 

The example he came up with was that he went into a luxury hotel and asked if he could stay in one of the penthouse suites free for a night. Well, no surprise. He got a no. But using this technique, he actually was permitted to take a nap on one of the beds, which was a hilarious story in itself, but it’s just putting the Cialdini psychology into practice.

Preston Pysh  31:19  

So there’s two in particular that I want to talk about. We might hit a little bit on this during the episode, but he talks about how rejection is human and how most people when they’re rejected, they immediately start looking internally opposed to a more balanced overview of what just happened. In order to assess it correctly, you got to look at what is the other person’s position and why did they feel that way. And then, why do I feel the way that I feel? 

And when you balance out those two sides, you’re going to come to a much more credible idea of what actually happened and why the rejection actually took place. So you’ve got to try to understand the other person’s vantage point because you obviously understand yours. So that really goes back to that “why” question, and that’s really important for people to focus on. 

Stig talked about it being a numbers game, I think that’s really important. And then the other part that I kind of talked about there at the end with his wife, is this idea of focusing on what you can actually control versus what you can’t control. 

I think so many people get caught up emotionally in the way that they feel and they get into, “I can’t do anything about this.” And that’s the end of their opinion. “I’m never going to be able to do this. And these are all the reasons why I can’t ever do it,” instead of really kind of looking at it very analytically, and saying, okay, that just happened.

 But now, let me list out all the things that I can actually control to ask this question again that will actually get me to a “yes” in the future. And then, profiling that and listing that and trying to improve that and trying to optimize it. That’s how people are going to be able to get over this fear of rejection is by doing it and going after what they can actually control in life.

Stig Brodersen  33:02  

Alright guys, that was all that Preston and I have for this week’s episode of The Investor’s Podcast. We see each other again next week.

Outro  33:09  

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