Yeah, we know. Getting dinged totally sucks. You didn’t just put time and work into your apps. You poured your soul out into your essays and sweated over every single detail. You put together a beautiful meal, chose the perfect garnishes, and plated it like a pro. Then you get to the judge’s table, and Tom Colicchio tells you the hard truth… you were good, but you got outcooked by someone else. That’s all. Pack your knives and go.
But don’t spend too much energy wallowing. And don’t give up. If an MBA is still your dream, then the game is far from over.
We’ll even give you 10 reasons why you don’t give up if you get dinged:
#1: Bill Gates’s first business, Traf-O-Data, was a total flop.
#2: No one wanted to sign Jay-Z at first, so he created his own label. Now he’s, well, Jay-Z. And he’s married to Beyonce.
#3: Stephen King threw out his first novel, Carrie, after it was rejected the first 30 times. Luckily his wife dug it out of the trash.
#4: During his first comedy show, Jerry Seinfeld froze and got booed off the stage.
#5: Walt Disney was fired from his job as a newspaper editor. His boss said, “He lacked imagination and had no good ideas.” And his first few businesses went bankrupt, too.
#6: Einstein didn’t speak until he was four, didn’t read until he was seven, was expelled from school, and was rejected from college.
#7: Thomas Edison got fired from his first few jobs for being lazy. And his first 1000 attempts at the light bulb fizzled out.
#8: Oprah was fired from her TV reporter job because she was “unfit for TV.”
#9: Steven Spielberg was rejected from film school three times.
#10: Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.
All these folks got their field’s equivalent of a ding when they first started, and look at how things turned out. Just goes to show that you don’t need to take no for an answer. You just gotta keep on working at it. In fact, here are four things you can do right now if you got dinged.
And hey, they don’t call it a “ding” for nothing. It’s not a “boom” or a “blam” or even a “splat.” It’s a tiny little ding, like a spoon hitting a teacup. We’re not gonna let that get us down, that’s for sure.
