When asked to be a keynote speaker at a conference, I usually get to choose to some extent what I will talk about. Sometimes it’s about business, life, or a more niche area of expertise, such as event planning. But the one thing most of my speeches have in common—the one thing I truly believe myself to be an expert on—is being told no. Truly, I’ve been told no in so many different ways and by so many different people that sometimes it seems as if life itself is saying no. I am an expert in rejection—or more specifically, I am an expert in bouncing back from rejection and fighting my way toward my goal.
I suppose if I can gift you anything in the reading of this book, it’s that no is only an answer if you accept it. So allow me to use one chapter of this book to—I hope—light a fire under your butt. I want you to be so pumped up you can hardly stand it. I want you to have one of those nights when you stay up until one a.m. writing long lists of big dreams and plans. You know those nights—when you’re so excited you can’t shut off your brain and you end up having to take a Benadryl just to fall asleep?
Yes!
I want these words to excite you that much. I’m hoping some of my excitement rubs off on you—which, granted, would be way easier if I were giving you this speech in person—but I promise to use lots of italicized words for emphasis and to tell you about the word no and the role it’s played in my life.
I waited years for the opportunity to explain my relationship with rejection . . . a lifetime, maybe.
About six years ago Inc. Magazine named me as one of their top thirty entrepreneurs under the age of thirty. Ooh la la!
It was a huge honor (I mean, clearly, because I’m still talking about it), but the really interesting thing that most people don’t know is that when you get a prestigious title like that, almost immediately you begin to make hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Just kidding!
No, what happens is, every college within a hundred-mile radius immediately starts calling and asking if you’ll come and talk to their students. Since I haven’t stopped speaking since the moment I figured out how, of course I accepted every single request. Each of those sessions lasted about an hour, which consisted of thirty minutes of me chatting about my career and my company and thirty minutes of questions and answers. After a while, I could almost time to the minute when I would hear the classic question: “Hi, Rachel,” they’d always begin (because apparently we call adults by their first names now like we’re a bunch of hippies!). “Can you tell us the secret of your success? Like, what’s the one thing that truly gives you an advantage over others?”
First of all, God bless our youth. God bless these wee infants who believe that a lifetime of hustling and working and sweating and stressing and building, building, building a company could be summarized with one single answer.
But I tried.
At first when I was asked this question, I would give generic answers: hard work, dedication, making yourself indispensible, blah, blah, blah. But the more I went to schools and realized it was going to be the one question I got asked every time, I decided I’d better figure out the truth. So I began to ask myself questions.
What led to this massive platform and all of these fans? How did I get book deals and TV appearances? Why was I the one standing at the front of the classroom answering questions? Why not somebody else?
I think the obvious place to start is my family connections.
So, after graduating from Yale, and then later Harvard Business School, I began working in my family’s oil business. I later went on to be a part owner of the Texas Rangers before becoming governor of that great state and then—I mean, most everyone knows that my father was a former president, so when I decided to run for president myself . . . Wait, no, that’s not me.
That’s George W. Bush!
No, as a reminder, I grew up in a place called Weedpatch. That wasn’t a cute name for locals; that’s literally its moniker on any map that wants to include it. The point is, family connections haven’t been the secret to my success.
Seriously, though, after I moved to Los Angeles I started to gain some pretty influential friends within the entertainment industry. Paris Hilton and I became incredibly close. Later I went on to date Ray J (remember him?), and it really shot me into celebrity status. I used the attention from that relationship to get my own show on E! and then made millions with many kinds of products. When Kanye asked me to be his wife, well . . . Wait, shoot, nope. That’s Kim Kardashian.
The secret to my success isn’t celebrity status.
All joking aside, my success has a lot to do with waking up early, being the hardest-working person in the room, asking for help, being able to fail over and over again, and working constantly to improve both myself and my brand. But plenty of people do those things and don’t experience the kind of success I have.
You want to know what it is? Why I believe I’m the one writing this book right now when people who’ve tried to do exactly the same things I have haven’t succeeded?
It’s simple, actually.
It’s not about talent, skill, money, or connections.
It’s because when they went after their dreams and came up against a roadblock, when they experienced rejection, or when someone or something told them no . . . they listened.
I am successful because I refused to take no for an answer. I am successful because I have never once believed my dreams were someone else’s to manage. That’s the incredible part about your dreams: nobody gets to tell you how big they can be.
When it comes to your dreams, no is not an answer. The word no is not a reason to stop. Instead, think of it as a detour or a yield sign. No means merge with caution. No reminds you to slow down—to re-evaluate where you are and to judge how the new position you’re in can better prepare you for your destination.
In other words, if you can’t get through the front door, try the side window. If the window is locked, maybe you slide down the chimney. No doesn’t mean that you stop; it simply means that you change course in order to make it to your destination.
I realize, though, that not everybody looks at no the way I do. In order to inspire you to run headlong after your dreams, I may have to shift your perception of no. I’m going to give you everything I can think of to get you there . . . and I’m going to start with this question:
What if life isn’t happening to you?
What if the hard stuff, the amazing stuff, the love, the joy, the hope, the fear, the weird stuff, the funny stuff, the stuff that takes you so low you’re lying on the floor crying and thinking, How did I get here? . . .
What if none of it is happening to you?
What if all of it is happening for you?
It’s all about perception, you guys.
Perception means we don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are. Take a burning house. To a fireman, a burning house is a job to do—maybe even his life’s work or mission. For an arsonist? A burning house is something exciting and good. What if it’s your house? What if it’s your family who’s standing outside watching every earthly possession you own burning up? That burning house becomes something else entirely.
You don’t see things as they are; you see things through the lens of what you think and feel and believe. Perception is reality, and I’m here to tell you that your reality is colored much more by your past experiences than by what is actually happening to you. If your past tells you that nothing ever works out, that life is against you, and that you’ll never succeed, then how likely are you to keep fighting for something you want? Or, on the flip side, if you quit accepting no as the end of the conversation whenever you run up against opposition, you can shift your perception and fundamentally reshape your entire life.
Every single part of your life—your gratitude, the way you manage stress, how kind you are to others, how happy you are—can be changed by a shift in your perception. I don’t have an entire book to devote to this topic, so today I’m just going to focus on your dreams. Let’s talk about the goals you have for your life and how you can help yourself achieve them.
In order to do that, you have to name your goals. You have to shout out your hopes and dreams like the Great Bambino calling his shot. You need the courage to stand up and say, “This one, right here: this is mine!”
Before you continue reading, take a few moments to focus on a specific dream. Get out a piece of paper and write it down. Maybe write down ten dreams . . . maybe start with little innocuous things and keep writing until the truth comes out. Come on, girl—no one is watching. There’s nobody here to judge.
Cue: elevator music.
All right. Do you have your dream?
Great! Maybe for some of you, that’s the first time you’ve admitted that dream to yourself. But I’m willing to bet that most of you have met that dream before, even if you’ve never had the courage to put it down on paper.
Hello, old friend.
Perhaps it’s been around since childhood . . . maybe it’s something you’re currently working on . . . maybe you used to work on it but gave up. Either way, if this is still a dream you have, then chances are, you’ve experienced some rejection where this dream is concerned. So my first mission is to change the way you see the word no—to take away your fear of it. Fear is driving your choices and affecting your decisions, so let’s take the fear away. The best way I know to do that is to talk about it.
The Bible says, let that which is in the darkness be brought into the light. When things are allowed to sit in the darkness, when we’re afraid to speak them aloud, we give them power. The darkness lets those fears fester and grow until they become stronger over time. If you never allow your fears out, then how in the world can you disseminate them?
Why do you think every chapter of this book begins with a lie I used to believe? Because I want to encourage you to speak your own lies into the world. The trouble is, we rarely know they are lies until someone points them out or we get past them. Before we can name them, they just disguise themselves as things we’re afraid of. Think about it.
So let’s take the fear away. Let’s go through some of the reasons why people give up on their dreams. I want you to ask yourself if any of these examples sound like you.
Some people quit because a voice of authority tells them to. Voice of authority can mean all sorts of things . . . Maybe your first boss said you weren’t right for your dream job, and you believed it. Maybe a parent—out of love or fear or caution or their own issues—told you not to try. Maybe a spouse or partner or best friend was afraid of what would happen to your relationship if you grew and so they tried to keep you anchored to the ground. Maybe that voice of authority said you’re not “right” for it. Someone said you’re too fat to train for a marathon or that you’re too young to build your own business. They said you’re too old to take dance lessons. They said you’re too female to travel by yourself.
Maybe the voice of authority is your own. Maybe the negative self-talk in your head has been playing on repeat for your entire life.
Maybe an entire industry of experts is saying you’re not right.
I have wanted to be an author for as long as I’ve understood that books were created by actual people. Like most wannabe authors, I started approximately seventy-three manuscripts but never actually finished a single one. Then, several years ago, I decided to stop giving up . . . Just once, I thought. Just once I’d like to know what it’s like to finish!
So I began working on my historical-fiction-meets-time-travel book (because, I mean, why not write that on weekends?). Out of the blue I was approached by a literary agent. (Okay, just to give context, I suppose it wasn’t out of the blue. I was a popular blogger and had built up a following of fans as well as a lot of publicity as a celebrity party planner by this time.)
The lit agent asked me if I’d ever considered writing a book. Of course I started regaling her with tales of my time-traveling historical romance—which, in case you’re wondering, is basically every literary agent’s worst nightmare as a pitch from an unknown, unproven author. So this woman, bless her, read the first twenty pages of that Dumpster fire and politely came back a week later to inform me that it wasn’t really her style. She’d actually been reaching out to see if I wanted to do a nonfiction book on party planning. Since I was expressing an interest in fiction, though, she wondered if I’d be interested in writing a roman à clef. I’d never even heard of that term, but a quick Google search informed me that it’s fiction about actual notable people. You just change the names to keep yourself from getting sued. A great example is The Devil Wears Prada. The agent’s question was whether or not I had any juicy stories after having survived years of celebrity events.
Boy, did I ever!
As soon as we got off the phone, I knew the story immediately. I knew the story because it was my story. I’d moved from a small Southern-minded town to Los Angeles as a teenager. Before I was old enough to drink legally, I was working parties for the biggest A-list celebrities on the planet. I was a fish out of water and always awkward, but somehow built a career within that space. I didn’t even have to dream up material; I had years of stories so juicy I couldn’t have made them up if I tried.
I wrote ten pages and emailed them to her right away.
Two days later she wrote back: I can sell this all day long!
A literary agent . . . a real-life, legit literary agent told me that she could sell my book if I was willing to finish it. I nearly choked on my joy.
I became obsessed. I barely saw my husband or my kids as I wrote like an insane person until my first draft was finished. I kept telling myself that the only reason I didn’t have a book deal already was because I’d never actually finished a manuscript . . . so I believed this book was fated. I imagined in intricate detail what it would be like to hold the published copy in my hands.
I did finish the book, and the literary agent sent it to every publisher in New York. The initial responses were so kind and encouraging. Editors would write long emails back explaining why it wasn’t for them but telling me how much they’d enjoyed it. My belief that we were going to sell it only increased when three other publishers asked for conference calls to discuss it.
When I dialed into the first call, I thought I was going to pee my pants.