Rejection Therapy challenge turned out to be easily the hardest thing I've done so far with Hacked Man. I've started up about five new good habits, learned a couple of brand new skills and even started to clean up the apartment a lot more, but hitting 30 rejections in 6 days was way too much.

Me, after spending just one sleepless night after deciding on the Rejection Therapy Challenge.

"I 've made a huge mistake."

Here's a debfried on the "get rejected 30 times during this week" -challenge.

Cop outs! Cop outs everywhere!

The curious part about the challenge was that it effectively turned me into a buddhist monk. I suddenly realized I don't want that much anything from most people. When thinking about things I could ask, I realized that most things either take up time, create responsibilities or make the situation awkward for the people involved. Getting rejected is bad enough, but getting my request accepted would be even worse.

This made it sort of hard to think up requests. I didn't want to go down the "Do a duck dance!" -route and ask nonsensical stuff from people on the street. That would unnecessarily odd for everyone and I didn't manage to justify doing that just to satisfy a challenge. Even though I realize that getting used to odd and awkward is sort of the point.

Still, as I didn't want to ask nonsensical stuff from people, it was suddenly very hard trying to think up stuff that I would actually enjoy if the request got accepted. Realizing I don't really want all sorts of stuff probably has quite a lot to do with running a Rejection Therapy Challenge, but it also illuminated me something elementary about myself too.

What didn't I get

Still, I managed to get rejected 18 times. Among these I didn't:

• get a compliment
• get any discounts from a number of interesting companies
• get a free beer for compensation for drinking a really horrible non-alcoholic one
• get any comments (except one) or likes on my video that was watched 39 times.

What I got

• a pretty nice date
• interesting discussions
• surprise lunch company
• Role-playing game session agreed on
• some funny replies from companies I sent requests to

The real benefit

This was one of the most interesting things I've done in a while. Totally horrible, but very clarifying and revealing. Getting rejected seems to be so awful, that I actually sang on video and put it on the Internet, just to take my mind off going around and asking people for stuff. It's like when you suddenly clean up your apartment, start jogging and finish that one really hard course you've been avoiding, just to avoid writing your thesis.

Also, even as I failed this challenge (18/30), I was left with a pretty certain feeling that when I want something, I actually can ask for it. It was pretty of hard too, but when I thought up something that I wanted, I always managed to ask for it.

I actually think that Rejection Therapy could be used pretty nicely as a tool for trying to get something that you actually want. Like maybe use the normal version (1 rejection a day) when searching for a job. Getting one rejection a day would mean making many phone calls every day and being very proactive about your search. And if you couldn't get rejected when searching for a job, you'd have to think up something else and that wouldn't probably go to waste either.

Phew. What an interesting week. Glad that's over with.