FAILURE TOLERANCE CHALLENGE: DAY 1 — Ask for something you won't get

like your 99% sure you're gonna get rejected

This is a post in a six-week series on Failure Tolerance as a Magnetic Practice. If you want access to the full curriculum for this series, subscribe to The Twelfth House.

Day 1: Ask for Something You're Certain Will Be Rejected

We’ve spent the last few weeks diving into the concept of failure tolerance and generally trying to convince as many people as we can that it’s an objectively good strategy to adopt if you want to live a more interesting, fun, inspired, wealthy life. And this week we’re rolling up our sleeves to put the ideas into practice.

Welcome to the Failure Tolerance Challenge — five days of do-able prompts that will help you flex your failure tolerance muscles.

Quick admin note: All five days of the challenge will be unpaywalled until 24 hours after the fifth prompt goes up. After that, you’ll be able to access this content by subscribing to The Twelfth House. (Pro-tip: If you’re signed up to receive our emails, you’ll still be able to reference the original emails in your inbox after the paywall goes up)

And honestly? This is just us dipping our toes in the shallow end. Inside the North Node, we spend 21 days completely rewiring your relationship with failure, diving deep into the psychology behind Sacred Work, and building the kind of resilience that creates actual quantum leaps in your business. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

The psychological magic behind embracing a “guaranteed” rejection

I can practically feel you rolling your eyes through the screen: "wow, another woman on the internet advising me to embrace discomfort in favor of personal growth. Shocking! Original! Never been seen before!" And you know what? Fair point.

But stick with me here, because I’m not interested in force-feeding you platitudes about pushing your “growth edge” or testing your resilience.

Actually, I want to talk about how failure or rejection is just information; sure, our brains have been trained to treat rejection like it's the social equivalent of stepping on a Lego barefoot at 3am. Painful, unexpected, a little embarrassing, and almost always your own damn fault. Rude.

We're most terrified of failing at the things we care about most. Which means your resistance to asking boldly for something you want is basically a giant neon arrow pointing toward your most important work — so pay attention. Finding that work is probably the key to everything.

Rejection is really just information. Neutral information, at that. Sure, sometimes that information feels disappointing in a way that makes you want to chow down on that entire box of backup Girl Scout cookies you’ve been saving in the freezer for 9 months while questioning your life choices, but it’s not the character-defining catastrophe your nervous system keeps rehearsing.

When you deliberately seek out "certain" rejections, you're essentially doing a HIIT workout for your emotional resilience. Within 2-4 weeks of rejection practice, your brain creates new neural pathways that recognize rejection as survivable — dare I say, beneficial??? Hot.

Ur gonna flip over this… When entrepreneur Jia Jiang did his famous 100-day rejection challenge, he found that his requests were about 50% successful. Yup, even when Jiang assumed there was NO WAY that someone would entertain his request, he still had a 50% chance of his question getting answered.

Basically, even if ur scared shitless about the idea of putting yourself in the position to fail, there’s a pretty good chance you STILL won’t fail. (And you’ll reap the psychological benefits still. Sounds like a recipe for making you ridiculously, hilariously unstoppable)

This rejection practice is perfect for creative weirdos and intuitive freaks because it snaps you out of fear-based people-pleasing habits. It sort of forces you to stop self-censoring, quit self-surveilling, and just DO THINGS.

DAY 1

We’ll start easy — we’re making a request that we’re almost certain will be totally rejected. BRICK.

Now, depending on how much you want this to change you, you can ask for something low stakes and not-so-scary OR something that hits the sweet spot between titillating and terrifying. Seems like a big swing, but sending a DM to Michelle Obama asking her to be a guest on your podcast is actually kind of low stakes; she’s such a big name, it’s highly unlikely she’ll even see your DM. Might as well shoot your shot.

But a request that might actually make you break out into anxiety sweat could be the idea of sending your favorite publication a pitch to write a column in their next issue. The magic ingredient here is asking for something that would genuinely serve your business or creative evolution if they said yes, but currently feels just beyond your comfort zone's carefully constructed boundaries.

Some funcomfortable options:

• Ask a business you deeply admire for a collaboration (even if your inner critic insists you're "not ready yet")

• Pitch a workshop idea to that local wellness center you've been Instagram-stalking for months

• Request an actual conversation with someone whose work makes you feel simultaneously inspired and inadequate (hi, we've all been there, join the club)

• Ask for a discount at your favorite indie coffee shop (yes, this absolutely counts as rejection practice)

I think the secret weapon here is to lead with the energetic permission for the other person to say thanks but no thanks. There’s a difference between demanding for something you aren’t entitled to and curiously inquiring about what’s possible.

The first person is an asshole, the second person is intriguing and I’m about to buy them a drink because they just charmed the pants off me.

When you make the request, notice how your entire body feels before, during, and after asking… and upon receiving the outcome. This somatic awareness is what transforms rejection from something that happens TO you into something you're actively practicing for your expansion. Plus, it gives you really interesting data about your own patterns (and who doesn't love a good self-discovery momo?).

With that, pour yourself a nice tall glass of rejection. Because your work is about to get the kind of courage upgrade that changes everything, and honestly, it's about time.

Now go forth and ask with audacity — the worst thing that can happen is you'll survive hearing "no" (and build serious entrepreneurial resilience in the process), and the best thing that can happen might just completely reorganize your understanding of what's possible. No biggie! V casj!