We always hear underdog success stories. Take J.K. Rowling, who, as a single mother on welfare, wrote her first draft of "Harry Potter" and was promptly rejected by 12 publishers before one finally picked it up. Or Harry Truman, who failed as a hat maker early in his career and went on to be President of the United States. For these figures, and for many others, success was hardly given to them on a silver platter. For Rowling, Truman and others, there’s one thing that their ultimately illustrious careers have in common: rejection.
We all hate rejection, but whether it’s a blessing or a curse is up to you. It’s easy to throw in the towel when you’ve been rejected. It takes a strong, determined individual to stare rejection straight in the eye and use it to fuel their determination to succeed down the road. Kayla Nicoletti, a freshman at Tufts University, is a perfect example of someone who has dealt with rejection in the right way.
Kayla was recruited by Tufts for field hockey. Field hockey had been a huge part of her life throughout high school and middle school, and she was excited to live out her dream of playing for a collegiate team. She bonded with the other girls on the team during summer camps and preseason and was ready to start the school year with her new group of friends.
But that was not part of her coach’s plan. The field hockey coach pulled Kayla aside and delivered the news that Kayla never expected to hear: she did not make the cut for the team. Her initial reaction was anger and devastation.
“I lost a part of my life that I loved and depended on for my sense of identity,” Kayla told me.
It would have been easy to mope around after being cut from the team, but Kayla had other plans. She would not let this news stop her for being proud of herself for the hard work she put in during the summer before preseason.
Days after she was cut from the field hockey team, she decided to set an entirely new challenge for herself: she would train for the Boston Marathon. She had never run a distance longer than three miles before that point, but she had trained really hard for field hockey, was in great shape and was confident that she could pull off this new challenge.
She says she chose to train for the marathon because “not only would crossing the finish line allow me to feel a sense of accomplishment, but it would also signify that I finally overcame all of the emotional baggage that comes from getting cut from a team.”
Through a friend who had previously run the marathon, Kayla reached out to Don Megerle, the coach of the Tufts Marathon Team. The nonprofit Golf Fights Cancer offered her a number, and she began training.
With months of training, Kayla worked her endurance up so she could complete 20 mile runs. When the race day came, she was able to run the marathon with a sub-five hour time and in the process served a good cause, raising more than $7,600 for Golf Fights Cancer.
Kayla still sometimes wishes that she had made the field hockey team, but what seemed like her biggest personal failure actually led to new opportunities and made her stronger.
“Being cut made me a better person,” Kayla told me. “I would never have decided to run the marathon or join a sorority if I had not been cut.”
One of Kayla’s mantras during her training comes from an inspirational speech in the movie "Rocky": “The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a mean and nasty place and it will knock you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. But at the end of the day, it’s not about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. It’s about how much you can take, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done.”
Kayla found a new passion in running. Her goal is to continue working with the Tufts Marathon Team to keep in shape to run a marathon every year that she is at Tufts. Being rejected by the field hockey team inspired her to jump outside of her comfort zone and discover her new love of running and a new group of friends.
Kayla’s story is just one example, but the lesson here applies to everyone. Many of us have piles of college rejection letters, have been turned down for a job, or not making a team. When confronted with rejection, we can either mope around and feel sorry for ourselves or it can inspire us to succeed. Rejection can be a blessing in disguise if we refuse to take failure as an option. Sometimes it takes a few tries to find what we are meant to do.
