0:00 hello everyone it's levon here from jewelry sales training and in this video you're going to learn how to overcome your fear of rejection because it's going to happen a lot especially when you are selling jewelry so to help with that i'm going to be giving you an overview not just an overview an entire reading of the whole book rejection proof how i bet how i beat fear and became invincible through a hundred days of rejection therapy so this is going to be starting off chapter number one what i'm going to be doing and you know you can put your put youtube aside now as well because it's just more so the listing that's going to be important here you're going
0:47 to learn how chapter one applies to jewelry sales training by me reading through and then also by me expanding on different parts and concepts though as well if you do want to get the book for yourself the link is going to be down in the description though too so rejection proof is written by ja jin so let's begin with chapter number one meeting rejection so you're probably wondering why i was standing at this man's front door and what i meant by special project was this a new sales strategy a strategy i was practicing a dear social experiment actually it was a little bit of each it was part of the 100-day journey to overcome my fear of rejection a journey that gave me a new perspective on business and humanity and gave me
1:34 tools to be the best at almost everything by challenging myself to seek out rejection again and again i came to see rejection and even the world around me very differently it changed my life and i hope by you reading through this and learning about my journey it's going to change your life as well but before i tell you what happened next maybe i should go back a bit to the start the start was on july the 4th 2012. just after sunset thousands of people were gathered at a local community park waiting for independence day fireworks to start my wife tracy sat next to me on a blanket rubbing her belly she was eight months pregnant with her first child all around us kids were running with frisbees ice cream cones families
2:20 were unpacking picnic baskets beer bottles clicked and laughter felt the air everyone seemed so happy so filled with summertime joy everyone except me in many ways i was living the american dream and at just 30 years old i had a secure six-figure job at a fortune 500 company tracy and i owned a 3 700 square foot house with a pond view we even had a golden retriever named jumbo the quintessential suburb an american dog and now we were weeks away from the birth of our son best of all my wife and i had an incredible late relationship and not a day went by that i didn't realize how lucky i was to be in love to be in love with such an amazing woman and in other words i should have been overjoyed with my circumstances but the
3:08 truth was i was depressed as i could possibly be my my misery wasn't personal though it was professional i grew up in beijing china at the time when every school-aged child was taught to be a model worker building bl and a building block for growth of the nation but being a model worker in china or anywhere had never been my dream instead ever since i was little i'd fantasized about being an entrepreneur while other kids played sports or video games i devoured biographies of thomas edison and panasonic founder a very long japanese name i'm not going to even try to pronounce that looking for cues uh looking for clues about how to become a great innovator when i was just 14 years old bill gates
3:53 visited beijing his first ever trip to my hometown and i became obsessed with his story of founding microsoft i tore down all the sports memorabilia i had on my bedroom walls and made a fantasy made my fantasy about entrepreneurship as a life goal i vowed to become the next bill gates and invent an amazing technology product that would take the world by storm i persisted i i persisted my family and so tested my family into buying me a brand new line of computers and started teaching myself how to write programming code i even wrote a letter to which i still have never received a reply from uh to bill gates saying that i would buy microsoft by the time i was 25. drawn in by this flashy
4:39 hollywood description of america and the fact that bill gates lived there also i believe that i would one day move to the united states to fulfill that destiny when i was 16 i was presented with an opportunity to become a high school foreign exchange student in the united states and go to an american college afterwards i jumped on it the transition it was difficult to say the least the language the culture the barriers were a struggle to overcome and i was sad to leave my loving family so this area actually does connect quite well also because for many of you if it's the first time you've ever gone into this area of like luxury sales and even walked into a place like a jewelry store but you've decided i'm gonna start by selling stuff there this in itself can be quite a big jump to
5:26 adjust to like the culture the feel uh behind that though as well just like he's experiencing his move over to the united states so to make matters worse the situation i walked into was not a good one my first year in the united states was spent in rural louisiana of all places for the exchange program i did a lousy job background checking my host family and as a result my first home away from home was in a creepy house having a family full of criminals i learned that their older son had been convicted of murder a year prior to my arrival and it was his bed that i slept in even worse two days after my arrival my host parents stole all my money sleeping in a bed of a murderer and losing all my money was not the introduction to america that
6:11 i'd been expecting i'd left the protective support of bubble of my own family in china only to land with a family that immediately broke my trust that scared me and i didn't know what to do ultimately i reported i reported the theft to my high school superintendent who then reported to the police my host parents were arrested and the mortified folks at the exchange program moved me to another another home and luckily the home of a wonderful family there i not only re-experience love and trust and gain spirit and gain spiritual faith i also learned that there are good people and bad people in the world um they certainly did not treat me the same way throughout this shaky start my dream of becoming an entrepreneur in america
6:57 stayed as strong as ever in fact i didn't believe there was any way that i could fail becoming an entrepreneur felt more like my fate or death or destiny than any sort of choice on my part the goal was so deeply embedded in my heart that i don't think i could have shaken it even if i tried to after one year in high school and another six months at an english in an english language institute my family had my english had vastly improved now it was in january 1999 that i was ready for college i still remember my first state university of utah and i was 17 years old there had been a snow storm the night before and the entire campus was covered in white i can still hear the sounds of my feet the sounds my feet made
7:42 as i walked through the snow to class that morning leaving the first set of footprints of the day the universe the the universe was a fresh snow field in front of me ready for me to blaze my own trail and become the next great immigrant entrepreneur in america i had youth hope and energy on my side everything seemed possible now my first real chance to launch my entrepreneurial dreams came when i was still in college for years i'd constantly been thinking up cool new devices that i could invent one day i was flipping through an old photo album and i saw a picture of myself roller skating as a kid some of the happiest childhood memories were me roller skating with my friends suddenly i
8:27 started to think about how cool it would be to combine a tennis shoe with a rollerblade kids and adults could be walking one moment and gliding around with their friends the next the world would become a giant skate rink and happiness would be widespread excited i pulled out my sketchbook and started drawing out various ideas of how to functionally embed wheels into a shoe i loved this idea so much that i even drew even drew a formal blueprint to submit with a future pattern application it took me an entire weekend afterwards i felt like it created the mona lisa now sure it may have not been the most life-changing idea the world had ever seen but it was my idea and i thought it was awesome and it could be the invention that launched my
9:14 entrepreneurial career i have an uncle in san diego my father's younger brother who i've always held in extremely high regard while my parents were both very easygoing my uncle was very strict and demanding which somehow made me want his approval even more to be honest i was scared of him as a child but i always knew that he cared about me and wanted me to succeed so after i moved to the united states he and i became even closer and i viewed him almost as another father so much so that i would later name my son after him i always felt so i always felt so much sure of myself when he liked my ideas and my choices so i sent him a copy of my drawings excited to get his reaction to the shoes with wheels at wheels idea and hoping for some encouragement
10:00 now imagine my disappointment when instead of support i received a verbal smackdown now there's another part that definitely connects back through to jewelry sales training most of the time you are going to come across idols now these people could be people you work with as well that are doing really really well now you might have an idea of maybe how to handle their objection in a different way how to ask for the sale in a different way something along those lines now sometimes they're going to have still a different viewpoint even if they are really successful so take it as a grain of salt when you do take feedback from someone as well you know always ask for constructive criticism but don't let the constructive criticism break you down or
10:45 take you down though either just like he's experienced here with the feedback he got from his design now as i said imagine my disappointment when instead he received a verbal smackdown my uncle thought the idea was silly and he chastised me for it focusing on something that was so far-fetched when i should be concentrating on my school and improving my english i felt so dispirited that i tossed my sketches into a drawer and never moved forward with the idea now if my own uncle had rejected my idea i felt sure that the world would hate it even more and i wanted no part of being rejected in the public by strangers instead i focused on getting good grades and continuing to improve my english using thousands of flashcards i spent many hours every day learning and memorizing new english words excelling
11:33 at school was a surefire way to win the approval of my family especially my uncle and i didn't just want their approval i craved it i told my i told myself that straight a's and an impressive vocabulary might also make me a better entrepreneur someday my good grades did pay off in some way i landed the scholarship offer from birmingham young university where i transferred and completed college yeah i felt like i could have missed something so much bigger two years later a man named roger adams uh exac roger adams basically created the exact same thing shoe skates and founded the company heelys in 2007 just after its ipo heelys was valued at almost 1 billion dollars meaning my blueprint sat in a drawer
12:20 gathering dusk sadly it's not the only blueprint in there over the years have come with dozens of new ideas and i thought had the potential to turn into successful products rather than pursuing them i just added them to the pile and then gently closed the drawer of course there's no guarantee that my shoesgate innovation would have succeeded the same way that adams did uh which was adam's one was healy's or that of any other that would have been a foundational success or a successful company but i never even gave them a chance or myself a chance to even find out i rejected my own ideas before they could even be rejected by the world giving up at the first sign of rejection felt much safer than putting my ideas out there to be criticized definitely another big part right here so putting
13:06 your ideas out into the world if you really do have an idea of maybe how something could be displayed in the jewelry store you're working in as well even if you are new a new fresh set of eyes it's good to put your side of things out there now even if that does get turned down though as well it's better for it to be turned down then to maybe the idea was so foundational and such a great idea that that store manager even wrote it on down though as well and then it sent it off to his boss as well and it gave you recognition company-wide because of that idea of how you would display jewelry was so different though as well so never never leave those things hidden put it out there into the world this is another
13:52 sign of how you could use the information in this book uh to apply it to jewelry sales training and working within a jewelry store now it was much better and easier for me to do all the rejecting by myself but every time i saw kids skating on heelies and malls sidewalks playgrounds every time i read an article about adam turning his childhood passion into a pop culture craze i thought that could have been me the pain and regret were unbearable i thought that i'd feel the freedom to become an entrepreneur after i graduated from college with my computer science degree fresh in hand but the opposite happened the family social pressures didn't fade away and if anything they became stronger instead of winning others approval by being a good student i now wanted their admiration by
14:38 having a strong and stable career i haven't started a company in college and i didn't start one after college either instead i tried out job after job until i realized that being a computer programmer wasn't my thing scared that the path that i'd chosen has been wrong i changed my career tracks in a way that made me feel safe i re-entered the family comforts of school this time pursuing an mba at duke university afterwards i took a marketing job at a fortune 500 company and i thought the accolades and approval i would receive from my prestigious degree and my new six-figure income would satisfy my inner entrepreneur now i couldn't have been more wrong on the first day of my new job my boss asked me to write a short self introduction one of those questions was what would you be doing if you
15:23 weren't doing this without hesitation i wrote down being an entrepreneur someone then asked me then why aren't you i didn't know how to answer it it's amazing how fast the years fly by and how how big that gap can now grow between your vision and yourself and the reality of your life simply put i'd sold out my dream that teenager walking on snow hadn't become the next bill gates instead he became a marketing manager sitting quietly in his cozy little rung of the corporate ladder miserably collecting a good income once in a while the envy of friends or the pride of family would give me a temporary but false assurance that i was doing well in life but for me the relentless ticking clock of life was the sun mulching away the snow fields of my dreams and
16:09 ambition i remember one day after coming back from work i locked myself in my closet sobbing for hours i hadn't cried for a long time now sitting on a july 4 blanket i couldn't help but feel my entrepreneurial dreams were over before it even had a chance it took off if i hadn't taken that leap to try and build a startup as a startup as an 18 year old college student or a 22 year old single guy or a 28 year old mba how could i do it as a 30 a 30 year old middle-aged manager just a few weeks from becoming a father being a parent and brought with it a whole new set of responsibilities and that i thought would require me to put my dreams permanently to rest a loud
16:54 explosion went off in the sky and then with darkness was lit up there were bright colors sitting there contemplating my future and it was almost if i could see the sky an imaginary slideshow of what the rest of my life would end up looking like at work i'd continue to sell more products train more employees and establish more processes at home we'd have one or two more kids sending them off to school and then eventually to college the slideshow ended at my own funeral with someone paying a touching but typical eulogy praising my loyalty and dependability it was a eulogy just for another good guy not the world-changing entrepreneur i had dreamed of becoming tracy looked over at me and for weeks she'd known that i was miserable and she knew why you could have another car house promotion or job but if you can't
17:42 live with this kind of regret she said and then my wife my very pregnant wife did something amazing she issued me a challenge she told me to quit my job take six months to start a company from scratch and work as hard as i could to build it if by the end of that time i still had no traction no investment i would hop back on the corporate ladder i felt a surge of adrenaline at the thought of truly being free to follow my dreams but the fear quickly set in if i failed there would be no guarantee that i could get a job nearly as good and i would be seen as a fool in the eyes of my of my friends and then there was a small matter tracy's parents like me tracy was born in china and her parents have very traditional ideas of what constitutes work and success my father and in-law
18:28 like most fathers-in-law was skeptical about the guy who had won his daughter's heart but based on that tracy told me i i learned that i learned that he liked how i provided for my family wouldn't quitting my job drive him over the edge i'll take care of my parents and they're concerned she said you just make sure that you give everything you have and leave no regret there's been many moments in my life where i've realized that i married up and this was one of them for the longest time i had fantasized about the day i'd quit my job and start a company now the day has arrived and i wasn't sure how to go about it should i pull a jerry maguire making a loud speech in the office before storming out or should i do something even more dramatic making a grand exit like the jet blue flight attendant who quit by going down the
19:14 evacuation slide of his plane i didn't do either of these things because on the day that i gave my two-week notice july the 5th i was actually scared out of my mind my job had been the safety net for a very long time once i quit i knew there was no going back and i was about to embark on a great unknown about also i felt oddly worried about my boss's reaction apparently my fear of rejection ran so deep that i was actually concerned that she'd reject my quitting and i didn't want to upset her but i knew i had to do it so i visualized the drawers filled with dusty blueprints and mustered enough courage to knock on her office door once insider stumbled through my her speech telling her about my dream of becoming an entrepreneur if i didn't do it now i
19:59 would never do it and i told her almost pleading for her to understand not to get upset the speech was a far cry from jerry maguire my boss was visibly shocked she stared at me for what felt like minutes and i was wondering what she was thinking she was probably contemplating what kind of insanity had come over me that i would give up a nice income and quit my job before having a baby i didn't want her to think ill of me which felt like the kind of rejection but i didn't know what else to say so i just sat there shifting around uncomfortably eventually she found a voice oh my god she yelled who's going to take on all of your projects now we have just had a hiring freeze now what do i do i've been afraid of her bridge i've been afraid of her rejection but it was clear that she had other things on
20:45 her mind soon after that i started telling my friends that i'd quit my job feeling a little surprised each time by my own words when i made the announcement to everyone who came to a baby shower there was an awkward silence instead of a pin drop i think i actually heard a chopstick drop two weeks after quitting i walked out of the mammoth office building for my last time saying goodbye to my salary health benefits 401k and my air conditioned office all my comforts and all of my excuses for not letting my dream grew smaller and smaller in the rear view of my mirror as i felt excited and free but also scared tracy was scheduled it was scheduled to deliver my son brian in four days holy crap i said to myself this is for real and i better not screw
21:31 it up now there's no manual for building the next big thing but every startup begins with an idea and i have been mulening over over this for a while something i believe that was better and more sophisticated than the wheels on shoes for a while i've been thinking about how and why people keep their promises people make casual promises to friends family members and co-workers every day what if i could develop an app that would issue some kind of points or credit for fulfilling promises gamifying promises could potentially motivate people to keep their word and improve their relationships and generate fun in the process i'd spoken with plenty of friends about the idea as well as several entrepreneurs who i admire and the majority of them liked the idea some
22:17 talked to me about it for hours their feedback told me i was onto something and gave me the confidence to finally try turning one of these entrepreneurial ideas into a reality on the same day that i quit my job i started looking for people to help me create my app specifically i needed top-notch software engineers with the programming skills to write code in the software startup world i was considered a non-tech founder meaning i had the ideas the business expertise but i didn't have the killer programming skills needed to write that up for myself so i started recruiting i asked everyone i knew for potential leads when i ran out of acquaintances i approached strangers at meetups even at local basketball courts when i ran out of in-person options i hopped onto craigslist and linkedin my
23:03 frenetic efforts paid off within weeks i'd assembled an international team of whipsmart engineers the first was vic who was finishing his masters in computer science and already had a job offer at ibm if i could dream it vic could code it the second person was chen a computer scientist phd candidate who was specialized in programming algorithms and can read advanced software architecture theory for fun then there was brandon who lived in utah and was literally a hacker in high school he sold his own hacking software for profit later he dropped out of college after his own small mobile app company became successful enough to support him the last person vj was an engineer and engine an engineer in india and a former colleague of mine we never
23:50 met in person but i knew him and i knew he was a hard worker and a master at coding i was very proud of my team and honored that they believed in my vision and were willing to jump on board soon after hiring them i rented space in a co-working facility specifically designed for entrepreneurs downtown austin texas and we got to work building the app and the business and it was hard complicated and required long hours week after week but after that i was having the time of my life i was amazed by how fast a team of capable engineers could build software and we blazed through our five iterations of the product development in three months we built a web app an iphone app it felt intuitive and fun we started using the app amongst ourselves
24:36 and were surprised by how much our desire to keep score of our promises to one another bolstered our productivity of course it's one thing for an app inventors to love it getting outside into customers and to engage with customers within with a new app in a landscape filled with mobile apps was so much of a tougher sell thousands of apps get launched every day and we were contempt on having them all and having all of them for attention still it was evident that we had a good concept on our hands it might not become an instant hit but i knew we could make it work given a bit more time but we needed money tracy and i had been married for two years by that time and we were big savers i had invested most of our savings into
25:23 kickstarting this new venture as personal and operational costs piled up those funds started dwindling i couldn't invest more without putting a huge strand in our finances especially with a newborn child tracy had given me six months and i needed to start showing traction to justify the investment four months is the journey it looked like my prayer was about to be answered i promise a promises app had attracted the interest of an outside investor i spent hours preparing and scripting our pitch the team practiced it together over and over again as if we were rehearsing for the reality tv show shark tank now the pitch couldn't have gone better at least in our minds afterwards we high-fived each other in celebration and then began waiting the most agonizing weight i've ever experienced it wasn't the first time that i had this tense experience of
26:09 waiting for others to decide my fate when i was 15 i waited for weeks for the u.s embassy in beijing to decide whether to grant me a visa so i could come to the united states or not he ended up getting that now when i was 17 i waited for byu to decide whether to offer me that scholarship which means i could afford to go to the school that i wanted to when i was 25 i waited for my admission to duke business school when i was 28 i waited for the yes from tracy after proposing to her in front of 400 classmates and these were some of the most nerve-wracking moments with life-changing decisions hanging in the balance but i didn't know why in terms of anxiety they paled in comparison to
26:55 waiting for this investment decision i still believed that i was destined to become a great entrepreneur but i had just two months left to save my dream and this investment felt like a lifeline i wanted it so badly and i actually dreamed about getting a yes from the investor five different times each time waking up thinking the investment had come through and i vividly remember picking up the phone and calling my wife and family to tell her the good news in those dreams several days later i was at a restaurant attending a friend's birthday party when my phone vibrated and it was an email from the investor my hand started to shake and on an ominous feeling engulfed me i held the phone for a long time without opening the email trying to channel all kinds of positive mental energy into its content then i clicked open and it was a very short
27:40 email the investor said no now that is the end of chapter number one now you see that's a great example they are putting all of your eggs into one basket he mentioned about that investor saying no it's just like when you've presented something really big to a person and maybe they say oh you know what maybe sure i'll come on back and you really really really believe it but there isn't that much more commitment from them and then eventually you never hear from them again or you just end up getting a no and then you allow that to you allow that to personally affect you in a way that it ends up bringing you down that's something where you can't be you can't be allowing the rejection the
28:27 nose from customers from a day to day to day basis to affect you as a person they're not saying no to you they're just saying no to the product no to the piece of jewelry you showed them at that current time now that is chapter number one now make sure to make sure to subscribe to the channel though as well and looking out for chapter number two which will be coming up very soon so this way you can learn how to use the book rejection proof how i beat matthew and it became invincible through 100 days of rejection so how you can use this book to apply it to jewelry sales training now if you don't want to find the book again it's linked right down in the description
