Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Rejection letter

(Hopefully this will be a prelude to more regular blogging)

I just got back from an excellent seminar by Randy Sheckman. Before he started talking about his research, he commented on how some people react angrily upon receiving rejection letters from editors of journals who decide not to publish their research (Sheckman is now chief editor of PNAS). And then he put up a slide with what must be the ultimate response to an unfavorable review, and had us in splits.

Sheckman attributed this priceless quote to George Bernard Shaw (though I googled it to discover that it was Max Reger who wrote this letter to a music critic). Anyway, here’s the quote, the all time best response to a rejection letter.

“I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.”

5 comments:

Anil P said...

Imaginative :)

NANDKISHORE said...

Rejection is very difficult to digest one who can digest rejection
can achive anything

NANDKISHORE said...

Rejection is very difficult to digest,if one can digest rejection can achive any thing
www.metarial-spiritual.info

Wavefunction said...

Brilliant!

SAT said...

Rejection does not demean you. It does not deride you. It does not deny you. It certainly doesn’t defeat you. It doesn’t even defy you. So why let a single rejection or a 100 rejections stop you

The spider has no ego, it has no pride. It has no intellect in terms of counting how many times it fails. It is focussed on the objective and keeps on striving and trying until it's objective is reached. It can only focus on one thread at a time.
A rejection teaches you what you should not do next. A rejection teaches you where you went wrong. And therefore teaches you if you care to learn from it, what you should do right. If you can only remove your expectation out of the way; if you can only remove your ego out of the way, then rejection becomes a gift divine. It becomes a true teaching tool

Sathish