Two Comedy Rejections In One Week
How To Keep Rejection In Proportion (Comedy Mindhacks #109)
Within the last week, I’ve been rejected twice. One rejection, which just happened today, came after I took a huge swing and asked somebody very prominent in the comedy world if they would consider writing the foreword for one of my forthcoming books. The response was respectful, slightly encouraging, but ultimately still a no because they were already involved in something occupying similar territory. The other rejection came trying to get booked through a producer, only to eventually realize the conversation was quietly going nowhere. Neither interaction was rude. But neither gave me the outcome I wanted either.
I realized today how quickly my brain wanted to magnify those two moments and to do so in a very disproportionate way. What I’m getting at is: Rejection has a strange ability to grow emotionally larger than affirmation even when the math does not support it. Everyone’s probably experienced this. You go to an event and get ten supportive comments and one negative remark and the only thing you can remember is the one negative statement. That’s disproportionate! And I think that imbalance says something important about human psychology, especially in fields full of creative work.
I noticed myself mentally replaying both situations of rejection while completely minimizing several objectively positive things, several great successes that have happened in the last week. Today, while I was standing outside grilling hotdogs for lunch, I suddenly had this weird internal conversation with myself. I literally stopped and thought, “Michael, in the last eight days you performed at Nateland Live at The Lab at Zanies in Nashville, emceed a forum inside an arena in Virginia, performed stand-up in Kentucky with friends showing up to support you, appeared on international news discussing spirituality and AI, and gained a bunch of new subscribers to your website, including three new paid subscribers, and were booked for a future show.”
Suddenly, the emotional proportions started changing a little bit. For every rejection that happened recently, there were at least three times as many affirmations sitting right beside them. What made the timing of today’s rejection even stranger is that right after it happened, I literally received an email from the person who ran last week’s economic forum. Part of the email said, “We are so grateful for your preparation, professionalism, and enthusiasm. It truly showed! We hope to have the opportunity to work with you again in the future.” That landed differently because it arrived right after disappointment had started trying to dominate my perspective mentally.
In this scenario, one voice was basically saying, “No thanks!” Another voice was saying, “You did excellent work and we’d love to work with you again!” Life moves like that constantly. And, of course, I don’t say any of this in some cheesy motivational-speaker way either. I’m not trying to pretend rejection magically stops hurting once positive things happen nearby. Rejection still stings because disappointment is real. What I’m saying is that sometimes I need to put myself back in emotional check when my mind starts acting like rejection is the only thing happening in my life.
There are certainly seasons where the rejections massively outnumber the affirmations; I’ve gone through many of those seasons. Anybody who’s done comedy long enough understands those stretches where you have bombed jokes, failed bookings, unanswered emails, rougher-than-usual crowds, producers ghosting your conversations halfway through, and so on. Comedy can feel emotionally brutal when enough of those moments pile up close together.
But there are other seasons where opportunities quietly start stacking, too. Good sets happen, new connections are forged, strange doors open unexpectedly, and somebody reaches out with encouragement at exactly the right moment. The danger is that my brain often remembers rejection more vividly than affirmation because rejection feels more threatening psychologically. It reminds me of something I used to teach my kids while playing basketball, something I was taught while growing up: “Never leave the court on a missed shot.” Or more positively: “Always leave the court on a make.” In other words, don’t let failure become the final emotional memory; end with confidence, momentum, and something that reminds you you’re still capable.
Comedy requires that mindset constantly because rejection can stick in my mind aggressively if I let it. One awkward interaction can replay internally for hours while an entire successful set somehow disappears emotionally in fifteen minutes. I think comedians sometimes accidentally train themselves to obsess over failure while overlooking evidence of growth happening right in front of them.
A while back I wrote about what I called “The 20-Year Rule.” The basic idea was simple: If something will not matter to anybody twenty years from now, I should not spend more than twenty minutes emotionally obsessing over it. Honestly, I still think that is helpful. Lately though, I’ve started thinking about an even smaller version of that idea. Maybe it’s more of a “Minute-for-Minute Rule.” However many minutes I spent writing the email, preparing a pitch, doing a set, or taking a shot is how many minutes I allow myself to stay frustrated if things go badly afterward. Once that emotional clock runs out, I move forward instead of mentally building a campsite inside disappointment.
That’s basically what I did both times with rejection this past week. I let myself feel the frustration honestly because pretending rejection doesn’t bother me would just be fake. Then eventually I stopped replaying it and got back to work. Comedy moves too fast emotionally to stay parked inside every disappointment forever. Fact: Rejection only gets the final word if I hand it the microphone. Notice what I did here, in fact: I took the rejection, processed it, converted it to something positive, then wrote about it to help others, which is an additional positive.
I’m old enough and have been through enough life to know that some opportunities close down because timing is wrong and some people pass for reasons that have nothing to do with my worth or talent. But if I keep creating, keep writing, keep performing, and keep taking swings anyway, then rejection becomes part of the process instead of the conclusion of the story and, if I’m wise, I only let it linger for a few seconds or minutes.
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