Jia Jiang, TED Speaker on “Rejection Therapy”
Today, my guest is Jia Jiang, a TED speaker and Founder of Rejection Therapy, a website that provides inspiration, knowledge and products for people to overcome their fear of rejection. Several years after Jiang began his career in the corporate world, he stepped into the unknown world of entrepreneurship and discovered everyone's biggest fear: rejection.
To conquer the fear of rejection, Jiang embarked on a personal quest and started a blog, 100 Days of Rejection Therapy where his journey revealed a world that was hidden in plain sight -- a world where people are much kinder than we imagine. Since then, he has become a motivational TED Speaker and given numerous talks, including a Google Talk, and he is currently the he CEO of Wuju Learning, a company that teaches people and trains organizations to become fearless through rejection training. In 2015, he authored a bestselling book, Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection. It was a distinct pleasure to sit down with him at his offices in Silicon Valley.
In this candid conversation, Jia shared the real stories behind his viral "rejection therapy" experiment, the surprising lessons he learned from actively seeking out a hundred "no's," and his ultimate mission to use technology to help others overcome their deepest fears.
1. The Rejection Muscle. Jia revealed that despite wanting to be an entrepreneur his whole life, he didn't start his company until he was 30. When his first attempt to secure investment ended in a painful rejection, he wanted to quit immediately, realizing that a deep fear of rejection was holding him back from his dreams. To fix this, he started "rejection therapy," a 100-day video blog project designed to intentionally seek out rejection and desensitize himself, treating his courage like a muscle that needed to be constantly trained.
2. The Krispy Kreme Epiphany. What started as a personal challenge quickly exploded into a viral sensation after he filmed a Krispy Kreme employee actually agreeing to make him custom donuts shaped like the Olympic rings. As his videos racked up millions of views, he realized he wasn't alone; the fear of rejection is a deeply ingrained, universal human survival instinct. Through the 100-day process, he learned invaluable real-world skills about negotiating, holding his ground, and knowing exactly how to ask questions to turn a "no" into a "yes".
3. The Power of Asking. Jia shared that his most memorable rejection experiment was walking into the University of Texas at Austin and simply asking a professor if he could guest-teach a college class. To his amazement, the professor said yes, and Jia was able to fulfill a lifelong bucket-list dream of honoring his family's long lineage of educators. This profound experience taught him that people are often infinitely closer to their biggest dreams than they realize, and sometimes the only thing missing is simply taking the first step and having the courage to ask.
4. The Technologist's Dream. Despite his massive success giving TED and Google talks, Jia insists he doesn't want to become a professional motivational speaker like Tony Robbins. Viewing himself as a technologist inspired by Bill Gates, he is instead actively developing an app to digitize his rejection therapy and scale its impact to millions of users. Looking further down the road, his ultimate dream is to build schools in rural China to provide vital opportunities for brilliant kids who simply weren't born in the right zip code.
