Do You Define "Loss" as a Failure?
If you are working as an independent scholar, in particular, you will experience loss - there is no way around it. There will be times when you get a rejection to your proposal, over and over, without any type of acknowledgement of what might make you a better fit. You may decide you want to work as a full-time scholar by applying to lecturer or professor posts but never get short-listed with no idea as to why?
There will be times when you receive the insulting "there were so many good candidates" email without any understanding of how or why you ranked where you did. And, without the feedback, the likelihood of you receiving more rejections seems more and more likely.
If there's something you could improve, you are not provided with feedback to improve in most instances. I will pause here to say that this is a truly dysfunctional system. Whether you have 15 applicants or 150, when applicants are truly spending the time and energy to respond to your request, they deserve more than a form letter which is dismissive and implies your time has value when theirs does not.
That said, as an applicant, it can be incredibly hard to keep yourself encouraged. I have heard of people who have put in over 100 applications for academic posts and received an invitation to only one interview.
We have heard of people sending their abstracts and query letters to dozens of editors and publishers with a rejection "We're sorry, but it's not for us." And, if you are an academic, the time spent on preparing for jobs, fellowships, writing for publication - they can steal your time away from other things.
The M2M Research Network is preparing a series of seminars to help bolster your ability to write effective proposals and academic articles/chapters. While we are preparing this information for you, we thought it might be helpful to just remember this: you may have defined the rejection as a "loss," but you are not a failure.
Click below and see an example of this from one of our high-profile athletes. Let it nourish your soul. While today may not be the day that you receive the funding, the job, or the acceptance, none of those things makes you a failure. You are more than enough.