From Startup Failure to Viral Inspiration: Jia Jiang’s 100 Days of Rejection

Almost twelve years ago Jia Jiang, an aspiring Chinese businessman who came to the US to build his life, had arrived at a point in life where he received his first rejection from a failed business pitch. But instead of feeling let down and de-motivated, the entrepreneur saw the situation as an opportunity to grow back and attain immunity towards the fear of getting rejected. He designed 100 Days of Rejection, a self-help experiment to overcome the debilitating fear of being told "no".

Jiang began his journey as a marketing manager for Dell. After that he had developed a social media application called Hooplus which resulted in investors bailing out of the venture after four months of investing.

Inspired by the game “Rejection Therapy”, Jiang began to document his experience of getting rejected for 100 times through blogs. Over the years, his experiments started to influence many, and went viral for inspiring people to try the same experiment themselves. Online followers too started documenting their rejection experiments, sometimes something as simple as asking for a piggyback ride to a stranger or asking for a free refill of burger.

The 100 Days rejection therapy not only aims to eliminate the fear of getting rejected, but in turn also prioritizes the importance of the ‘power of asking’. Jiang attested that by doing the 100 days rejection therapy, it desensitized himself to the pain and shame that rejection often brings and, in the process, he said that he had discovered that simply asking for what you want can open up possibilities where you expect to find dead ends.

Not only that but this challenge is also interesting because it not only improves our confidence levels in terms of asking, or placing a proposal forward but it also helps us to embrace the embarrassment and move on without de- motivating ourselves. And due to these kinds of intrinsic characteristics possessed, this challenge became viral all over the internet.