I was just admiring our rejection collection. We started the rejection count on December 7, and we're already up to 17 rejections-- Yay, us! [Click here to read about the party we held upon reaching 100 rejections.]
The academic life includes a lot of rejection when you're doing it right. In a recent post, I wrote about Simonton's Equal-Odds Rule, which states that "The relationship between the number of hits and the total number of works produced in a given time period is positive, linear, stochastic, and stable" (Simonton, 1997, p. 73) In other words, everything you produce has an approximately equal chance of being great. The only way to increase the chances of producing something great is to produce more things overall. And since most submissions are rejected, it means you must learn to take rejections in stride.
So in our lab, we celebrate rejections. When someone announces at lab meeting that they got a paper rejected this week, we cheer for them. "You know who doesn't get rejected?" I ask. And someone answers, "People who don't try."
Which brings us back to our rejection collection. We used to keep it as a list on the wall in the lab, but it was hard to access remotely. So we made it a shared google sheet. Now we invite everyone in the lab and in the writing workshop to contribute their rejections. We celebrate each other's efforts, and we know that each rejection is not only a step on the road to professional success, it is also one step closer to eating delicious pizza with our friends. Here's hoping that everyone who reads this post gets to celebrate some rejections with good friends this year.
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