OH NO! THEY SAID NO!

Whenever someone tells me they got a “no” on a job they wanted, I look them in the eye and say, “great news!”

Now I’m not being mean, and I’m not so naïve that I don’t know it’s tough to get a no, but guess what. If you are looking for a job, you are going to get a lot of “nos.” So think about it. If I have to get a lot of nos before I get a yes, then if I just got a no, I’m one closer to that yes.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s really how it works. Sales people really understand this. I’ve known sales people who really celebrated the nos. They knew that if they got a no they were just that much closer to a yes. Statistically speaking it’s just how it works.

I had a wise boss once who’s advice was always “fail faster.” He ran a medium size research facility. He didn’t want everything to fail, but he knew that in research there are just a lot of failures. So the idea was to get to the fail point as quickly a possible so as not to waste any more time than needed on a failure and move along to the next thing. In research there are probably 99 failures for every success. If it takes you a month to get to the failure point then you will have a success after 100 months – that’s over 8 years. If you can shorten the failure cycle to 1 day then your success comes just over 3 months. So failing faster can be a profitable idea. In my opinion it’s pretty much the same with finding a job.

Now, this advice needs to be taken with a healthy dose of common sense. It doesn’t mean you should fail or get a no on purpose. It also isn’t an excuse not to do your best or to apply for some job that makes no sense for you just to get a no. But if you get out there, work your program, do your best, and give it your all, then a no really isn’t a bad thing.

You’re just that much closer to that yes. Which ain’t a bad thing.

Remember to that if you have to get through a lot of nos then you better have lots of irons in the fire. I'll talk about volume and what I think of it, in a future post.

If you have a question email ZippyTheWonderbat at zippyjobadvice@gmail.com