Rejection Is Your Resume | Daron Roberts | TEDxUTAustin

So it was 2006 and I was sitting on a conveyor belt passing through Harvard Law School making frequent deliveries to Wall Street firms across the country and all of these firms were indistinguishable, featuring the same symbols as the partners carried. The same pinstripes, all the documents smelled like something you'd dig out of

your

grandmother's attic, and at the end of that summer I got a call from a friend of mine. We had both played football in high school. Now I know I look like a strapping young man. but when I was a senior at Mount Pleasant High School I weighed five foot seven, one hundred and sixty-three pounds and that was on protein shakes and bananas, and my friend was also a small football player, but We both loved the game and So I go to this camp and I'm sitting in the back of the room and the coach comes out and says one of our volunteer coaches hasn't shown up, so it's 2006 and I'm on my Blackberry, like this that you don't do it.

Judge me, but I'm on the Blackberry and I look up and I think to myself, okay, he says, do we have someone who can replace this coach? I'm thinking to myself that I played football at home in Texas on a Friday night, so I raised my hand and he said, "Okay, coach, where are you from?" I said Mount Pleasant High School Mount Pleasant, okay, what's

your

name? Coach Roberts Coach Roberts you have group six I had no idea what this man was talking about. Group six consisted. Of sixty sixth graders, none of whom had any athletic talent, they didn't know how to pedal, they could run forward even worse than that, their parents had taken them to the Academy to the Nike store and they had heads, wristbands and anklets that simply They were doing.

They were protecting the house, they were all the things so that these children couldn't play football. They had a coach who couldn't coach football and for the next 72 hours we spent most of our days together and at the end of that experience. I recognized something that had never happened before in my life for three days. I didn't have to set my alarm to get up every morning. I got up and was excited to coach these young men and what really surprised me was the fact. that for very brief moments around a football field kids from the south side of Chicago kids from the north side of Dallas these are kids whose parents don't shop at the same kind of grocery stores, they don't go to the same kind of churches that they don't No I drive the same type of cars, but for very brief moments on a football field, socioeconomic status and career move away and you have eleven guys who are trying to make a play work, so I decided I wanted to be a football coach. football and the first.

What I did was I called my mom, you don't know, Gwynn Roberts Quinn Roberts for 30 years was an elementary school principal, so I called and I said mom, I want to be a soccer coach, oh honey, that's cool, right? do you think your law? signatures will allow you to do this as a pro bono project I said no mom I want to do this full time he said okay let me put your dad on the phone you don't know Reverend Curt Roberts 38 years minister at Mount Olive Baptist Church The Reverend Roberts gets on the phone and says son, what's wrong with you?

I said well, I worked on this campus again, whatever, let me ask you this. Do you know how much debt you have? I did it at that time. I could spend five years at Cambridge I had accumulated two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt, you mathematicians will know that this is a quarter of a million dollars without interest, keep in mind, printers, I said, Dad, listen. Bank of America does a great job of reminding me every day that from the moment Dean Elena Kagan hands me that diploma I have six months of freedom, that's all.

You also remember our deal and the deal was this: my parents would pay for undergrad but I would pay for graduate school and law school. I said well, technically dad. I know you owe me money. I have a full trip to go to Texas, so you never paid me back so you could use that money to pay for law school being the minister you are. You said well, let's pray son, etc. We pray, the prayer ends, they hang up the phone and I'll write a letter to every NFL team, okay, how many, how many are there, how many are there, 32 I'm going to say the name of a team and you're going to say no, you're ready Chargers Bills Patriots Cowboys ok, now it's getting bad, ok, listen, I get the point.

I received 31

rejection

s as soon as I mailed a letter, a

rejection

letter would arrive the next day for most of the 31 rejections. I remember receiving the letters. and I hung them in my apartment and in the hallways and my friends would come and listen. These are classmates who are headed to the White House and will be Scalia's secretaries and they said to me, Darren, what the hell is wrong with you? and I finally got the One yeah, I needed it, so Herm Edwards, the head football coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, calls and says I need to talk to Darren Roberts.

I'm not convinced Herm Edwards magic is right, so I said yeah, son, what's wrong with you? Well, you don't know anything that has been documented, here's the deal. I work on this campus again. Whatever. Listen, I don't even open my own mail, but my assistant got your letter and put it on my desk. I don't know why you want to do this, but. I pulled out a pen, so I pulled out my Pilot V5 precise pen and he said, "Write this down: boot camp intern, boot camp intern, no pay, no pay, no benefits, so at this point I'm wondering why?" I need the pen, no pay, no benefits.” 18 hour days, said son, I need to answer right now, it took me two seconds to say yes, I'm in, so after I graduated I drove my 2002 Tahoe from Cambridge Massachusetts to Kansas City Missouri and for all intents and purposes I was the snarl. so if the offensive lineman needed 35 barbecue sandwiches, I was his man, if the defensive lineman needed two boxes of skulls, and I know a lot of you are refined people, skulls, this is chewing tobacco, okay, I was a guy that happened from 7-eleven. to 7-eleven to get as much skull stuff as he could and would return to Arrowhead for six months.

I slept at Arrowhead Stadium. I had a double inflatable mattress and I slept on it because I wanted to be the first face that Herm Edwards saw every day arriving at 4:15 and my only hope was that if I could last a whole season I would have a chance to make it, so in the end of the season we were four and twelve and you, mathematicians. You will also know that this is not a good record and there is this phenomenon called Black Monday in the NFL. This is not to be confused with Black Friday, which is a day when you can get great deals on electronics.

Black Monday and the NFL is on Monday. after the last game of the regular season and this is the day that the coaches are fired and then I saw these coaches go into Edward's office and leave and they have little time to gather all their belongings and leave the building, so a secretary comes into my office, which was actually a converted closet, we had ripped the door off the hinges, so she knocks on the frame and says Coach Edwards would like to see that I'm walking into his office and I'm thinking to myself, technically , they can't fire you, listen, if you Googled Darren Roberts and the Kansas City Chiefs in 2007, absolutely nothing would come up.

I had to sneak in the team photo. I had to sneak into the plains. I was kicked out of one for all intents and purposes. and purposes, he wasn't there, so I walked into his office and sat down and Coach Edwards said we really appreciate his contributions, that's the death blow he's preparing and I'm thinking to myself this is not going to go well. in Mount Pleasant. Texas I got fired from an internship and I hear the sound of a piece of paper sliding across his desk and I look up and see the NFL shield and Coach Edwards says welcome to the National Football League, this is your first contract as a coach now.

Listen, three years into law school, I pulled out that precise Pilot V5 pen, saw something that looked like my name and a line, and I could have started a fire at Arrowhead Stadium. I mean, I scribbled my signature so fast that he said, wait, hey, son, wait. You thought you wanted to represent your two terms. I know, no, no, no, just take this, this is for you, run that as soon as humanly possible, that's how I started in the league. I spent seven years coaching with the Lions and I coached at West Virginia and with the Cleveland Browns and then I came back to the University of Texas because after I got fired from the Browns, my son came up to me and I was making scrambled eggs and he said that you were preparing breakfast, he was three years old at that time.

Like, Dillon, he leaves, he comes back, you have breakfast, so I turned my life around and said, hey Hillary, we're spending a lot of money on this private school that we're sending Dylan T and I, I don't know if it's too late. to get a refund well we have our receipts what's wrong and Hillary Bing Hillary turns to me and says tell me the last time you had breakfast with Dylan and then Smert goes silent and I realized I can't even think The last time I had breakfast with my son and the cruel irony was that I had spent the better part of seven years with other people's children and my own son didn't know me so I came to the University of Texas and I'm teaching. classes and the first question I ask students and I have taught over a thousand students here at the University of Texas, the first question I ask is what is holding them back, is that college students have clarifying questions and they want to know if it is qualified and I say listen, just type the answer and I've collected these answers and what would you guess is the word that keeps seeping to the surface?

It's good, you can read fear, fear, fear, fear and as you start to unpack the answers, it's not. just fear, but it's fear of taking risks and fear of rejection now Bronnie Ware was a palliative care provider and she asked people, men and women on their deathbeds, what was their biggest regret, what were some of their biggest regrets? ? And this answer keeps coming back again and again to her work. I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself. Now, in ancient times, the Egyptians would write a question on papyrus if they were considering the risk of making a big decision and they would answer. to the Oracle and they would slip this request under the door and wait for some response, maybe it was a crow flying from above, well today we have Instagram stories and the survey we survey the people we ask, hey, should we join this startup? we should leave our jobs and it's very difficult for people to understand and figure out at what point they should jump and this is the reason why it's like it's falling economists have determined that there is now this phenomenon called the IKEA effect We've all been to Ikea, You know, you walk in and you see these pristine desks and the light flows so softly along the oak or faux oak and you see this desk and you start imagining it in your apartment, so you buy it. and they throw that box on top of your Prius and you head home and then you realize you don't have screwdrivers, you don't know what a mallet is and you start building this thing and what you end up with looks like a desk, it looks like a desk.

It wobbles, one of the drawers doesn't open all the way, but this is what you've spent so much time building, it's yours to keep, and these IKEA effects are truly the New Age notion of sunk cost. So what we're finding in the research is that many people are either willing or unwilling to change their circumstances or take a risk because they spent a lot of time building their status quo and they don't even want to think outside of what they want. I continue to live as they are, so I have done something cruel and I have a research team here at the University of Texas.

We have started introducing rejection tensions to the students in my class, so, for example, one of my assignments is a rejection challenge. so in pairs I send the students and they have to go ask a Starbucks barista for a free drink, so they have a partners video episode, okay, and it's cool, you should see the pictures, I mean the person who records on video the one who seeks rejection. her hands are shaking, she's nervous and we asked them beforehand hey, listen, what chance do you think you should take at risk in life and then we asked them the same question and what we found is that the more we expose people to rejection? but chances are they are willing to take a risk in the future and this is why this is my theory: we build up so much anxiety about the decision to take the plunge and once we survive we look back and say no.

It was so bad here's another assignment this is something you can do at home but you won't do it because you're afraid it's the rejection

resume

so I want you to take that prestige and

resume

that you have under education I want you to list all the schools you went to who did not enter each of them in work experience list all jobsthat you didn't get list all the internships that you were rejected in honors and awards in the same way every distinction you didn't get and This is what I tell you will happen if you sit alone and look back at this list of rejections, you will begin to realize That at the time they seem like something you will never be able to overcome, but now you will look back and say that I can weather that storm and maybe I will have the courage to move on to the next risk, so I implore you not to think outside the box.

I beg you to burn the whole damn thing, get out and be rejected thank you