Interpretation and Seeing Rejection as Redirection

Daniel AlShriky
3 min readJun 30, 2018

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by Daniel Alshriky

Without a doubt, almost all of us face rejection at some point of time in our lives. Whether it is from family, friends, plans, relationships, social engagement or you were passed up for a promotion, rejection hurts. However, rejection also has a way of teaching and redirecting us in making our lives better.

“Every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being redirected to something better.”
Steve Maraboli

For some people, they take it as a lesson to learn from, others ignore it to avoid the pain, that depends on our decision. How we think, feel, perceive and interpret things will have a major impact on our behavior.

We can accept rejections when we have positive thinking and encourage to deal with it. This will crystallize our reactions now and in the future.

Interpretation and Redirection

We have to believe rejection unleashes the imagination to figure out what’s the reason behind this rejection. It triggers human’s stimulus to think about more options — these options show us a different perspective to understand our boundaries and how much we are ready for another challenge.

The rejection leaves space and be open for challenge, mission, and mentality for enhancement and discovers many solutions.

Rejection drives our curiosity and makes us ask people why they have different opinion than us. Sharing each other’s point of view helps you both see things from each other’s perspective. The more we got rejected in life the more skills and learnings we developed. Rejection is a part of success. Remember, the most successful people failed before they succeeded.

Below are a few examples of how to interpret rejection:

- Find more options and discover more to choose which one is the best
- Just one personal opinion
- The answer is coming from the wrong person try with the right one
- Try again?
- Tell me about your opinions?
- Trigger the competition to get a massive result
- Technical limitation
- Not now, could be in the future
- Lack of knowledge so we have to do more research
- Try again in different ways
- Find the right time to raise your question

One of the most obstacles that stop us to accept rejection is the ego. Ryan Holiday explains how we can deal with ego. He wrote a book based on a personal experience called “Ego is the Enemy”.

Rejection comes from people who need to achieve the best results and this attitude should be honest and courageous. We learn a lot from them.

Honesty is a very expensive gift. Do not expect it from cheap people
Warren Buffett

Choose a few options and reject thousand of options around us — this is talent, creativity, and challenge to do different things and influence people.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.”
Steve Jobs

Without rejection, we wouldn’t understand how life works, we wouldn’t be able to change, learn how to deal with difficulties of life and grow for the better.

Interpretation and redirection are good tools to change our action, feeling, and attitude.

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Daniel AlShriky
Daniel AlShriky

Written by Daniel AlShriky

UX / UI Leader | Researcher | Extended Reality (XR) designer

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