A little tough love, we have all been there.
When I graduated I was rejected by almost every big firm I applied to. I was rejected by Nike 4 years before they recruited me. Another 4 years after that I became one of the youngest directors there. After working for a good firm, and for one of the biggest brands in the world I applied to a creative director role at frog… only to get a pretty nasty rejection email… 3 months later they recruited me. After I negotiated a nice pay raise and move package for myself and signed the offer letter I told them to check their HR database to see that they had previously rejected me. I thanked them because them recruiting me is what allowed me to negotiate a better salary. I did the to explain that I wanted a new recruitment process in place for when I hired people, and I worked with HR as a friendly partner to make that happen.
Pick yourself back up and keep at it. It isn’t the first time you have been rejected and it damn well won’t be the last. If you want to give up, that’s on you. Your portfolio is 1/3 of the battle, your attitude is another 1/3, being at the right place at the right time (luck) is the last 1/3. You can’t control the luck bit, but you can be ready for it with solid work and a great attitude. I’m not saying to be grateful for scraps. It is good to aspire, to be ambitious, to push, but you have to be someone people want to work with. Venting through a public statement does not reflect that. We’ve all been there. I find it best to call up an old classmate or colleague and do that over a beer and then figure out what I’m going to do next and move on.
Running my own firm I get rejected all the time. Our budget is too high, our portfolio isn’t quite right, the CEO has a buddy he wants to use… whatever the reason, it’s totally fine. I turn down work all the time as well for all kinds of reasons (their budget isn’t high enough, it isn’t an industry or project I want our brand associated with, it just doesn’t seem like the right personality fit and I don’t want to drag us through that…). It is just business. Conditions could change in 3 weeks and it might be the right fit, you never know.
I know it can be hard when you get a few of these in a row, and I know this is easy to type but hard to live by, try not to take it personally. It might have nothing to do with you. I got rejected from a job at Adidas right out of school because it was down to me an another guy and the other guy played baseball in college… that was the reason I was given. I can’t go back in time and devote less time to my design studies and play sports, nor would I, so it just wan’t the right thing for me. 6 years later I was designing a shoe with Derek Jeter… keep moving forward.
My attitude has always been, if you fall flat on your face, at least you’re moving forward. All you have to do is get back up and try again. Richard Branson