In 2012, 30-year-old Jia Jiang walked up to a stranger and asked if he could borrow $100. “No” was the response from the baffled man sitting in a hotel lobby. He wanted to know why he was being asked, but Jiang didn’t explain; he just said thanks then walked away. This was Jiang’s first day of rejection therapy, a concept created by Canadian entrepreneur Jason Comely that challenged people to approach strangers with weird requests to build their resilience against rejection.
Jiang’s fear of rejection centred on a memory of being shunned in school as a young boy. A teacher had invited classmates to come up with compliments for one another, but they all went silent when it was Jiang’s turn. It dented his confidence for decades. By his 30s, he was working as a senior marketing manager, but his dream of developing mobile apps was stalled by fear of his pitches being rejected.
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