You finished your masterpiece. It’s the book that you’ve always wanted to write, the blog post that is definitely going viral, or the billboard that’s sure to send sales through the roof.
And then someone says no.
The publisher says “not for us”, your editor returns the work covered in corrections, or the creative directors send you back to the drawing board.
Ouch!
Rejection hurts. It can leave you seriously questioning if you’ve got what it takes to succeed. However, it’s part of the process and often unavoidable. Rejection has happened to everyone, even the most successful creatives.
From Wintour to King, Edison to Gaga, here are 9 legendary creatives who, on the cusp of their iconic achievements, were forced to face rejection head-on.
Stephen King
You could say that Stephen King’s lengthy and celebrated writing career was built on rejection.
In his memoir On Writing he describes how, as a teenager, he would collect the rejection slips sent to him by the fiction magazines he submitted to, stick them on a spike in his wall, and use them as motivation to keep trying. By the time he was 16, King was getting personalized rejections, a mark of how far he’d come.
In On Writing, he explains that one scribbled comment from an editor, “Not bad but puffy. You need to revise for length. Formula: Second draft = first draft -10%” forever changed the way he edited his fiction.
Anna Wintour
After moving to the US in the 1970s, Wintour worked as a junior fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar but was fired after 9 months. She puts it down to her choices being too edgy and her editor’s belief that her mindset was “too European” for her to understand the American market. As she explained: “In his eyes, I was neither commercial nor professional.”
In 1997, Wintour admitted (a touch regretfully) that she had moved more towards her editor’s perspective as her understanding of the commercial aspects of the magazine business grew. As for that charge of being “too European”, she said that it was combining what she learned from both the British and American industries that led to her unprecedented success at Vogue.
Wintour regards getting fired as a positive experience because of what it taught her: “Everyone should be sacked at least once in their career because perfection doesn’t exist.”
George Orwell
When attempting to publish his allegorical novel Animal Farm during World War II, George Orwell knew it would likely be a struggle. The book was a scathing political critique of a British ally. He was right. The book was turned down multiple times.
One of the most interesting rejections came from fellow literary heavyweight T.S. Eliot who praised it as a distinguished piece of writing but thought it was flawed as a critique. “After all,” he explained, “your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them”.
Not to be silenced, Orwell kept trying and the book was eventually published in 1945.
Zaha Hadid
Renowned architect Zaha Hadid was no stranger to seeing her designs go unbuilt.
In 1994 when her career was just beginning to gain traction, her ambitious design for the Cardiff Opera House won the decision committee’s vote but was denied funding. She is quoted as demanding: “Do they want nothing but mediocrity?”.
Hadid’s radical, fluid designs continued to polarize opinions throughout her illustrious career. She faced further rejection, most notably when her firm’s Olympic stadium design was abandoned by the Japanese government. But she never stopped pushing the boundaries of what could be achieved with flowing lines and glass, as seen with the Guangzhou opera house and the Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics in London.
Heydar Aliyev Center, Zaha Hadid – Via Architecture Daily
Augusta Savage
Augusta Savage was a talented sculptor and part of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s and 1930s.
As a black female artist determined to challenge the way her culture was represented in art, Savage faced many hurdles during her career. One of the most notable came in the early 1920s when her scholarship to study at Fontainebleau School of the Arts in Paris was rescinded after the selection committee learned of her race. Savage publicly criticized the decision in the press but it wasn’t overturned.
Savage continued with her work and was eventually able to raise the funds to study in Paris in 1930. When she returned to New York, she devoted much of her time to making art as accessible as possible to aspiring black artists, founding her own studio where anyone could come to learn and becoming the first director of the Harlem Community Arts Centre.
She once said: “I know much I was put down and denied, so if I can teach these kids anything, I’m going to teach it to them.” She’s a powerful example of how rejection can motivate people to resist and also to uplift others.
Augusta Savage working on “The Harp” – via The New York Public Library
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison faced a major rejection early in his career.
Hearing that various legislative bodies in the US were interested in electronic vote tallying, Edison set to work creating his automatic vote recorder. It was his very first patented invention and he was only 22 when the patent was granted in 1869.
Unfortunately, the machine didn’t go down well with Congress. Politicians worried it would take away the crucial interactions that took place during the voting process. The chairman of the deciding committee went so far as to say: “If there is any invention on earth that we don’t want down here, that is it.”
Rather than giving up, Edison simply turned his attention to other designs. His resilient attitude towards failure is encapsulated by the way he described his struggles with perfecting the incandescent lightbulb (and failure in general): rather than failing, he claimed he’d successfully found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga’s rise to superstardom wasn’t a smooth journey.
In 2006 she was signed by Island Def Jam, only to be unceremoniously dropped 3 months later. CEO L. A. Reid recalls their first encounter, telling her that she would “change music” but explains that he later found himself underwhelmed by her demo tapes. He chose to cancel her contract, something he would come to regret.
Lady Gaga has said that the day she was dropped was one of the worst of her life but that she’s chosen to embrace obstacles as part of her creative process. She based her music video for her song “Marry the Night” on the experience and explained: “I am destined to struggle, I am destined to write music about the struggle, and I accept it willingly.”
Claude Monet
In the 1860s, making a living as a French artist relied on having pieces accepted by the annual salons in Paris: exhibitions that were largely responsible for dictating the current fashion.
While Monet had several early pieces accepted by the salons, he ran into trouble as he began to experiment with new techniques. These techniques would come to define the impressionist school of painting: short brushstrokes, undefined subjects, and bright colors. Several of his most ambitious works were rejected for their so-called “unfinished” appearance.
Not to be cowed, Monet united with several other artists to create an independent exhibition, a decision that led to the impressionist movement. The name for the movement came from the title of one of Monet’s most harshly criticized paintings, “Impression, Sunrise” (1873).
Barbara Corcoran
The investor, TV personality, and writer, Barbara Corcoran now uses her keen instincts and creative vision to provide funding and support to new startups on the TV show Shark Tank.
However, she very nearly missed out on the opportunity when the makers of the show tried to rescind their offer for her to appear. In a blisteringly honest letter to the studio head, Corcoran described several of her past rejections and how she proved each doubter wrong, claiming “all the best things happened to me on the heels of rejection.”
It worked and the studio invited her to try out for the role, which she won.
Speaking of fighting back against the rejection, she later said: “You’d think if you really tried something and you didn’t get it that you would feel embarrassed, but I never found that to be the case. I felt self-pride that I tried, and then, of course, so many tries you wind up getting a few yeses along the way.”
Knowing How to Move Forward
Rejections come in all shapes and sizes. Some can teach you valuable lessons about your creative work or industry, while others happen for reasons that are completely beyond your control.
But as the stories of Stephen King, Anna Wintour, Augusta Savage, and all the other famous creatives who have ever faced rejection show us, it’s what you do after the rejection that matters.
It’s your ability to carry on in the face of rejection that defines you as a creative.
