By Jonathan Wutawunashe

It is not always your fault when they don’t hire you. The state of the economy, a poor definition of the position on the part of the prospective employer, an incompetent interviewer, a tough choice between you and another excellent candidate for the job-any of these may very well be the reason why they did not offer you the post. Whatever the case may be, you can waste a lot of your time “investing” in an unproductive blame game, and that will be your fault. I want to empower you with the knowledge that being turned down for a job you tried for does not take you out of the driver’s seat in your life and career journey. The buck still stops with you. You hold the highly significant power to decide the very meaning of your not getting that specific job, particularly whether not getting it means your life is now in limbo. Let’s discuss some positive possibilities.

My dad’s car once broke down on the highway, and he had a frustrating time flagging down other people’s vehicles to take him to the nearest mechanic. He found it particularly insulting when one car slowed down and appeared to be stopping for him, and then suddenly picked up speed, leaving him at square one. His account of how he moped and drew extravagant conclusions about Providence’s negative attitude toward him, the meanness of human beings and so forth, is quitecolorful, as is his characterization of the “eternity” it took for a vehicle to genuinely stop for him. The startling lesson, though, came five miles from the scene of the breakdown, where, to my dad’s horror, the mangled remains of the vehicle that had almost stopped for him were scattered across the blood-stained highway. When some promising opportunities give us a pass, it may well be for our good. Fire the job that didn’t “stop” for you and work patiently to create the next opportunity.

A certain music producer is famous for the wrong reason. He turned down The Beatles. On a much humbler scale, I can relate to that, because a record label turned down my band when we approached them for a record deal, adding to that injury the gratuitous opinion that music like ours would never succeed. Lennon, McCartney and their Beatles colleagues must have felt the pain of rejection, but they didn’t allow negative emotions to paralyze them. In my band’s case, we got quite incensed and determined, and made a robust retort that could have started a fist-fight. Well, the next step the Beatles took is a phenomenal piece of history that the whole world knows. My band, The Family Singers, it so happens, also made history on a more microcosmic scale, a story that has made it into the pages of a music industry textbook or two, and that is even searchable on the Internet. The very songs that were rejected by the label are now coveted soundtracks for television shows, and better artists than us have recorded cover versions of them.  The lesson? Fire that job that turned you down, and move on. There are other prospects for you to make an astounding success of, and they are not to be found in what has already transpired. Although his reference was to religion, the pop/folk star Bob Dylan captured the essence of this energizing principle in his song “Pressing On”.

My third (or fourth, depending on how you are counting) story came to me courtesy of a cousin I approached with an opportunity I was certain he would jump on. I had just started a Desk Top Publishing business that was doing well, and that needed a manager-in-training, as I wasn’t always going to be around to oversee operations. I was astonished, and felt quite slighted (words like “ingrate” were screaming to be said, but fortunately I confined them to my angry brain) when my cousin turned down the offer. He was (un)kind enough to explain. He told me that he had applied for other jobs and had been turned down. The rejection had prompted him to ask the question “What qualifies these people to turn me down, or, for that matter, to hire me?” The answer that his ruminations led him to empowered him in a manner that he had not imagined possible: my cousin decided that these people were not special, but just human beings like him. If they could place themselves in positions where they could hire, reject and fire other humans, why couldn’t he? Sick and tired of being turned down, my cousin took control of his life and fired even the job that came to him on a platter. Today he is a prosperous businessman who deals in electronic goods. As I write, I have just learnt that he has landed a deal to run the sole Service Centre for a popular brand of cellular phones.

The story of the neighbourhood irritant shall be my last for the purposes of this article. I once lived in a Maryland suburb in the Greater Washington, DC area where we all had ample gardens and lawns. The first time I met Rod, I was quite annoyed with him. Just as the cops-and-robbers story I was watching on television was building suspensefully to a climax, a loud knock came on my front door. Fearing some sort of emergency, I rushed to open the door, only to be greeted by a smiling young man whose friends needed to talk to him about the advantages of showering (with great difficulty, I resisted becoming an instant friend for that purpose). “Your lawn is a mess, Sir, and I think I can do something about it”, Rod exclaimed cheerfully to drown out the TV behind me. “Fix it, then!” I shouted, anxious to get back to my story, and quite certain that Rod would recognize the sarcasm in that instruction and retreat to wherever he had come from. Well, Rod was either very dumb or very clever, because when at last I turned off my TV, I heard the drone of a lawnmower outside, and when I stepped out, I discovered that he was almost done, and what a beautiful job it was that he had done! I hired him on the spot, because I realised he had already hired himself anyway! In less than a week, I wasn’t the only one in my neighbourhood who had hired Rod, and the young man rapidly became quite the businessman, hiring a couple more fellows to help him meet the demand for his services. Rod and I got to talking one day, and during our conversation he told me that the idea of mowing people’s lawns had come to him when he reached a dead end in seeking employment. He was in the middle of morosely contemplating his jobless fate when the realisation dawned on him that a humdrum chore he grew up with could be turned into a business career with exciting growth prospects. The day he knocked on my door and interrupted my TV afternoon, Rod fired all the jobs and employers that had not let him in, and became an employer himself.

Of course, not everyone reading this will fit into all of these stories, as circumstances differ from person to person. I do hope, though, that I have presented enough examples for more than one of my readers to find one or more real life stories that will inspire them to convert seeming dead ends in their job search into outside-the-box career prospects.

About Jonathan Wutawunashe

Jonathan is the author of the motivational business book Fulfill Your Threats: Simple Principles to Help You Succeed in Life, also published as a Kindle Book. His blog can be found at http://PossibilityPages.blogspot.com

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