Growing Older

"Actors have a saying: You don’t get 100% of the parts you don’t audition for. If you’re an artistic type, or a writerly type, or even just someone who’s looking for a job, you may have found rejections to be so painful that you’ve just stopped applying for things. Social media and streaming TV is so soothing—why would you put yourself out there for stuff you’re not going to get anyway?"

"But what if you set rejection as a goal? That’s what writer Kiki Schirr did at the beginning of this year: She resolved to get 100 rejections by the end of 2018—to apply for anything and everything that interested her, even things that she thought were beyond her grasp, and to treat each rejection as evidence that she was pursuing her goal. "