Dealing with Rejection

 

At the very outset, I need to say that I am not going to offer a quick-fix solution to you faring badly at job interviews. If you repeatedly get rejected, very simply, the problem is within you: not in the whole wide world around you. And the problem is more deep-seated than the correct posture when facing the interviewer, not looking into her eyes, or whatever.

If I were to cover the entire wide canvas of unemployment, there are a whole lot of elements in the issue. One can talk about, (i) our youth looking for government jobs and governments don’t have that many jobs for them, in spite of their current focus on infrastructure development; (ii) private jobs are directly related to more investments from the entrepreneurs, which means established businesses should set up more and more businesses in various industry sectors; (iii) first-time investors creating more and more business units; call them startups if you so want; and the (iv) possibility of looking at self-employment, meaning becoming a startup yourself.

In this brief paper, instead of covering the wide canvas, let us restrict ourselves to young men and women trying to seek jobs that are currently available; and in that effort failing to clinch a spot. 

Well, chances are you are one of the countless young men or women who think a beautifully printed university degree and a marks-sheet showing 85 percent marks make you crème de crème of this world. And if you earned a gold medal to the boot, you believe the world is going to prostrate before you. That gold medal, trust me, is only gold-plated, not 22 carat gold. Its market price shall perhaps not exceed 200 bucks. You end up facing a situation where the recruiter is rejecting you, and instead hiring someone else who had scored a lowly 65 percent. 

What went wrong? 

You are so devastated that you start yelling. “Travesty! Injustice! Or, you are even suspecting that it was fixed beforehand; you and a dozen others were only called for window-dressing. 

The problem is that our marketised education system encourages us to see learning as a product. The bottom line of this education is the results. There is great value placed on exam-training in order to ace the system and get better results. Better result is the dearly sought outcome. Students, teachers and parents increasingly judge the quality of a school or it teachers on their ability ‘to deliver results’. You have been taken in by this mad race for higher marks. 

Institutionalised education is mostly dispensed democratically (I use the word as a metaphor) in one manner to all. To be fair to the teachers, one has to admit there are severe limits to make it different for different students and even making it thoroughly interactive. And no; they cannot possibly take into account the background you come from. I mean it isn’t an issue with them whether your parent is a farmer, or a high court judge. What was the environment in your home? What yearning for learning was instilled in you in your home? None of that can be taken into consideration. In your school and college, it was like you are a water tank in which they pour one jug of water every hour every day, with no consideration to the number of holes that may be there at the bottom of your tank. 

This education delivered content to you expecting you to learn, as if learning were a product. Your long-term retention was not the goal of that academic institution. Sadly, it wasn’t even yours.

Very unfortunate. 

You had to do something about absorbing more and retaining more from what was given at the college and acquire knowledge from everything around you. I repeat ad nauseam that learning is not a product; it is a process. What had to be done was that all learning had to be taken up as a process. 

Well, I don’t want to lose you in a word jungle. Education, knowledge, learning, skill, attitude, motivation, and goals. It is somewhat baffling at the first go. Yet, it is pretty simple. Understand all those words in one connected string of thoughts. They should no longer create an ambiguity in young minds. Eventually we should know how to chart a course in our lives, and also go on making mid-course corrections, as and when needed.

What you want is knowledge, skills to apply that knowledge to gainful uses, and developing the attitude to grapple with whatever seems difficult to comprehend. Understand that all learning from schools and all learning from everything and everybody around you must go into your knowledge bucket. And knowledge is a package that comprises information and experiences.

It comes from learning you can absorb from what they teach in the educational institutions. A multiple times more of it comes from what is informally gained through life experiences, consultations, extensive reading, listening to well-read people, debating, and keeping your eyes and ears open to everything around you. It comes from developing critical thinking by objectively analysing different views and opinions.

That is learning as a process. An urge had to be developed to learn from all including the blue sky above you, flowing waters in a stream, and the big fat banyan tree in the park. Then there are weeds, animals, the tailor, the garbage collector, the transmission towers and the saucer-like dishes fixed on those. What was India like before Mohammad bin Qasim, and who was General Dyer? Who was Susruta and who was Ramdhari Singh Dinkar? What is a kabaadi rag-picker’s life and how does he make his ends meet? What is communicating effectively? And a million other things under the sun and beyond it in the universe.

That makes you a knowledgeable man whose company is sought by friends. They look up to you for your knowledge. You earn their respect. Your social acceptance gives you confidence and builds your personality.

It is never too late to motivate yourself to get into learning as a process – as an inalienable habit. Learning will by itself go on filling your three buckets, and those are Knowledge, Skills and Attitude. A word of caution here is that education—institutional and other—has the potential of adding only to your knowledge bucket. Skill is quite another a matter for which you need to train your mind. Attitude is all about igniting that dormant fire in the belly.  

With these bucket sufficiently filled and filling yet more every day, you can avert the possibility of facing rejection anywhere—whether it be a job interview or finding a suitable life partner. Yes, that latter bit about the life partner too.

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