It's Lonely At The Top
U.S. Library of Congress
Don’t let rejection get you down--it might be the ticket to
creativity, science says. That’s right: If regular rejection doesn’t
cause you to lose all self-confidence and withdraw from the world
entirely, it just might boost your ability to think outside of the mainstream
and draw upon a unique worldview, suggesting that the kind of people
society considers “geniuses” might tend to have a go-it-alone, loner
mentality.
Research conducted by Cornell and Johns Hopkins University
researchers has shown that people who are able to handle rejection in
the proper manner--by shrugging it off and blazing their own,
independent trails--can experience heightened creativity and even
commercial success through an ability to eschew mainstream thought and
groupthink and instead pursue their own creative solutions to problems.
They tested their hypothesis through a series of experiments in which
they manipulated the experience of social rejection; subjects in the
study were led to believe that everyone in a group exercise could choose
whom to work with on a team project, only to be told later that no one
had selected them for a team.
For people with an independent mindset, this rejection inspired them to
go on and complete the exercise in a way that was deemed more creative
(we’re not exactly sure how “creativity” was measured). For people
without an independent mindset--well, we’re not really sure what kind of
impact this exclusion had on them (hopefully someone later told them it
was just an experiment, it was all in good fun, and really, everyone
here thinks you’re great).
Source: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-10/rejection-can-make-you-more-creative-science-says
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