Givaudan’s elite perfumers face a brutal creative process, losing 8-9 out of 10 competitive briefs. This highlights that for high-stakes creative roles, resilience and persistence in handling constant setbacks are more crucial for long-term success than just innate talent like a sensitive nose.
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An internal data analysis at McKinsey revealed that resilience—specifically, having a setback and recovering—is a better predictor of making partner than perfect grades. The firm has changed its hiring process to actively screen for this trait.
Rejection can spark creativity by closing an obvious path, forcing you to find an alternative. As interviewee Andy Kramer said, if you hit a wall, you must look for a door. This constraint forces innovative thinking and can lead to unexpected, often superior, outcomes that you wouldn't have discovered otherwise.
To succeed in its proprietary sourcing model where the default answer is often "no," TA Associates specifically hires individuals who have overcome adversity. They believe this trait builds the necessary resilience and motivation to persist through constant rejection without losing drive.
Counterintuitively, being brutally honest with candidates about the low odds of success is a powerful recruiting filter. It selects for mission-driven individuals who are mentally prepared for the inevitable tough cycles of a startup, ensuring they won't quit when things get difficult.
Despite winning 80% of his matches, tennis legend Roger Federer won just 54% of total points. This illustrates that top performers lose constantly. The key to extraordinary results is not avoiding failure, but developing the resilience to deal with it, adapt, and grow.
The vast majority of people and businesses fail because they break emotionally under the relentless pressure of failure. The key to success is not brilliance but emotional resilience. The winner is often the one who can simply stand to iterate on failure longer than anyone else.
Separate your sensitive artist self from a thick-skinned business persona. This allows you to handle rejection systematically and view outreach as a numbers game without emotional burnout, protecting your creative energy.
Highly successful individuals like actress Brie Larson often face staggering rates of rejection (98-99%). This reframes success not as the absence of failure, but as the ability to tolerate a high volume of it long enough for opportunities to materialize.
An oncology leader compares cancer research to elite sports. Success isn't about avoiding failure but about learning from a high volume of losses. Like athletes Michael Jordan and Roger Federer, researchers achieve greatness through persistence and resilience after countless setbacks.
The most successful founders rarely get the solution right on their first attempt. Their strength lies in persistence combined with adaptability. They treat their initial ideas as hypotheses, take in new data, and are willing to change their approach repeatedly to find what works.
