Greatness Rejects First-Time Applicants
Maya Angelou put it perfectly: “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.”
If Discipline is the foundation and Mindset is the framework, Resilience is the maintenance crew. It is how you recover from structural damage and come back stronger than the original build. Every engineer expects parts to fail at some point, so the real test of a design is how well it recovers.
Greatness rejects almost every first-time applicant. The leaders who break through are the ones who learn from each rejection and bounce forward.
In this week’s edition of The Leadership Engineer, I share what a centuries-old Japanese repair technique teaches us about turning setbacks into strength.
Some of the most celebrated careers in history began with a door slammed shut. Walt Disney often told the story of being fired from a newspaper job for lacking imagination. J. K. Rowling has said twelve publishers turned down Harry Potter before one finally took a chance on it. Michael Jordan failed to make his high school varsity team as a sophomore and spent that season on junior varsity. Steven Spielberg was reportedly rejected from the University of Southern California’s film school three times.
Stories like these come up so often that they stop looking like exceptions and start looking like the pattern.
Get John Lentini’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Most of us want the trophies without the pain it takes to earn them. What separates the people who break through from the people who disappear is how they respond when they fail. They learn from each setback, get better, and bounce forward.
Gold in the Cracks
Japanese aesthetics offer a useful way to think about this. Wabi-sabi is the appreciation of beauty in things that are imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. One of its best-known expressions is kintsugi, a ceramic repair technique. When a bowl breaks, artisans rejoin the pieces with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. Instead of hiding the cracks, they highlight them, and many collectors regard the repaired vessel as more beautiful than the original.
Resilience works the same way. At some point, you will break. The question is whether you hide the cracks or let them become part of your story.
Rowling was a single mother living on welfare while she wrote the first Harry Potter book. She never hid that chapter of her life, and it became central to her story and to the connection millions of readers feel with her.
Jordan never forgot being left off the varsity roster. He turned that disappointment into fuel, and it foreshadowed the competitive intensity that defined his career. He also learned that preparation changes how pressure feels. When you have done the work, the big moment feels like familiar ground.
Let the Gold Show
Wabi-sabi Resilience means you stop waiting until you feel whole again before you move forward. You work with the cracks, and you let the gold show. That is where Resilience turns into growth.
Which crack in your own story could become a source of strength if you stopped hiding it?
