The Art of Rejection – What Leaders Can Learn From Picasso

Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon – you know, that one of the five women with the lopsided faces – is considered to be the first Cubist painting of all time.

Not too shabby, wouldn’t you say?

But when it debuted to the public, people didn’t exactly ooh and ah. In fact, they ew-ed. They were angry and outraged (kind of like when Apple announced the name of the iPad.)

Even friends and supporters of the artist didn’t get it. Georges Braque, Picasso’s closest colleague, initially said – “To paint in such a way was as bad as drinking petrol in the hope of spitting fire.”

Not quite a 5-star review.

But Picasso persisted. He had a vision. And he went on to be…well, Picasso.

Here are just several modern-day rejects who made it:

• There’s a dude who we can thank for lighting up our life – literally. But it wasn’t all love and light in the process to get there – Thomas Edison failed over 10,000 times to invent a commercially viable electric light bulb. Ten thousand freakin’ times! When asked by a newspaper reporter if he felt like a failure and if he should give up, after having gone through over 9,000 failed attempts, Edison replied, “Why would I feel like a failure? And why would I ever give up? I now know definitely over 9,000 ways an electric light bulb will not work. Success is almost in my grasp.” What an epic reply!
• The original Apple Macintosh was a commercial flop — and had the sad, dot matrix spreadsheets to prove it. What if Steve Jobs had folded up his tent and said “I’m done, I’m going to try dolphin training”? You wouldn’t be reading this on your Mac or iPhone (or Samsung even) right now.
• And Oprah Winfrey. Here’s what she has to say about failure: ““The Oprah Winfrey Show was number one in our spot for 21 years, and I have to tell you, I became pretty comfortable with that level of success. But a couple of years ago, I decided, as you will at some point, that it was time to recalculate, find new territory, and break new ground. So I ended the show and launched OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network. One year later, after launching OWN, nearly every media outlet had proclaimed that my new venture was a flop…I can still remember the day I opened up USA Today and read the headline, ‘Oprah: Not Quite Standing On Her OWN’…It really was the worst period in my professional life. I was stressed and I was frustrated, and quite frankly, I was embarrassed…Then the words came to me, ‘trouble don’t last always,’ from an old hymn. This too shall pass. And I thought, I am going to turn this thing around and I will be better for it. And I am here to tell you that I have turned that network around.”—Harvard University commencement speech, 2013

So, what can you, as a leader, learn from that big reject Picasso, and those other big rejects Winfrey, Edison, and Jobs?

1. Don’t judge the quality of your idea by its initial reception.
2. Give up your need for applause – but not your vision. Be willing to leave people scratching their heads, and forget about being instantly accepted.
3. Put on your big-painter pants. Being innovative is no bed of roses. Picasso roughed it before he made it big. He even burned his own drawings to keep warm! Be prepared to dig in and dig deep if you want to pursue your ground-breaking idea.
4. Better to fail than to bore. You’ll gain more from crashing and burning than you ever will from coasting.
5. Listen to your gut. If your vision for a new and better way of doing things keeps tugging at you, then listen to that voice. Don’t give up.

The last word should be left to the great artist himself, who dared to be downright offensive:

“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”