rejection – Christopher Wink

Screen Shot 2012-03-15 at 10.50.04 PM — The home page of SussexToday.com, a proposed hyperlocal for Sussex County, N.J. as Patch.com was being expanded by Aol in mid-2009.

For any venture or project that reaches any remote level of success, there are surely failures that surround it.

By any standard, Technically Media is no more than a very small success, but before building that small business, I’ve had more than my fair share of failures. Being no stranger to rejection, I’ve tried my best to learn something from the handful of efforts (mostly other niche sites) that I helped launch around the beginning of 2009 in the hopes of finding a media venture of success — underemployed and without many opportunities.

Below, I share seven projects I tried launching before Technically Media, why they failed and what I learned.

Continue reading 7 projects I started before Technically Media and why they failed

Here’s something completely unoriginal: you’re going to get flat-ass rejected, crushing whatever self-indulgent perspective you have on yourself, and then you will go some place magical and it will change you.

Here’s my submission to the #jcarn FAIL blog ring.

In 2003, I was an involved and eager high school senior who struggled to focus and was a lot more interested in creative side projects than studying or school work. I thought it made me unique and valuable. Turns out, it just made me a shitty student.

I grew up in rural northwest New Jersey, where the population was made up mostly of either generational residents or the extended foam of the New York City white flight wave. My parents were the latter and my family all lived in or around the 67th ward.

I wanted to go to college in a big city, without following the footsteps of my classmates or returning to ancestral roots, so I applied to colleges and universities throughout the Eastern Seaboard. I am wildly involved, have decent grades and, come on, I’m a total hoot, I thought, these freakin’ schools are going to be fighting over me.

Until the very thin envelopes from universities started to come in.

Continue reading Rejection takes you further than success: why getting rejected a lot brought me here