The job market—how shall I put this delicately—sucks right now. My friends looking for full-time work are getting ghosted after several rounds of interviews and dozens of hours of unpaid work. My freelance friends (myself included) are finding it much harder to fill our schedules and our bank accounts. And my employed friends are feeling burnt out by all the unrealistic expectations their employers have of them and the very real mental load it takes to work with AI tools more than humans. In this environment, it’s easy to get discouraged and disgruntled.
And this is why I was so moved by Social and Digital Consultant Farah Cormack’s story. When Farah got laid off recently, she initially went into job search mode. She’d had a full-time role and figured that’s what she should go after to replace it. But she quickly realized two things: the job market sucks (see above) and she was actually getting much more traction when it came to securing freelance work.
Farah still needed income and clients, but rather than building out her business the same way she’d approached the job search, Farah took a different approach. She decided she’d spend the month of August trying to get 100 rejections. She’d send outreach messages, apply for roles, and ask for favors, all with the goal of getting 100 people to say no to her. (Although it wouldn’t be so bad if a few of them said yes along the way, either).
I loved this framing, so I asked Farah to share her story with me. Find an edited version of our conversation below.
Let’s talk a little bit about the inspiration for this project. It sounds like it was precipitated by a layoff, but you’d also done something similar in your twenties. Can you share a little bit about what you did that first time around?
I’m in my 30s now. In my 20s, I graduated in 2012 when we all thought the world had recovered from the Great Recession, but it hadn’t. I went to university in the UK—I’m Jamaican originally—and when you graduated, there was no way to stay on a visa unless you got hired in STEM. I was an English literature grad, and there was not a lot of demand for English literature grads in 2012, let me tell you.
Back home, the picture was even worse. I did what a lot of people did—I went abroad and taught English for a bit just to gain some experience. And the experience I gained was that I love kids, but I didn’t want to be a teacher.
So I went back home and I moved back into my childhood bedroom, because my parents were very, very generous. I looked for work and looked for work, and there was nothing. And I needed to figure out what to do. I knew I could write. I had a few articles in the school newspaper and the university travel journal, and that was all pretty much I had. So I started blogging. I did a few guest posts, and then I thought, “Well, maybe I can make something of this.”
I think a bit of it was the arrogance of my 20s, but I just thought, “Okay. Well, why not?” So I started pitching all the places I used to read. I pitched The Guardian, I pitched The Financial Times, I pitched The New York Times. I pitched every name that I knew. And I’m surprised to say how many of them said yes. Most of them said no, but I got a few yeses, and then from that built onto other yeses, and I met editors, and I built a little tiny freelance career that just grew and grew.
And from those bylines, one of the things I pitched was, “Can I come to Northwestern University for a degree in journalism?” And they said yes. My career grew as a journalist from there. That’s how it started.
And basically, that was a really good educational experience for me because it taught me that sometimes you have to make your own luck, and sometimes that can be wildly successful. And a lot of times success is on the other side of no or fear of hearing no, which always sucks. Don’t get me wrong. It always sucks to hear no. But it’s not that bad, and you get better at it.
After I was laid off—I was with this job for three years, I had a team that I loved and clients that I loved. So I felt really knocked down. I was job hunting for a bit, but I posted on LinkedIn that I had been laid off, and a couple freelance clients got back to me and they said, “Can you just pick up this one thing?” And I said, “Okay, but I’m not freelancing. I’m just picking up on the side because I’m looking for a job.”
But it’s a tough market right now. And I just couldn’t find a full-time job, or I’d get a job and it was pulled, or I’d get an offer and the role was frozen. And I thought, “This makes no sense,” because the freelance work was appearing. And I thought, “I’m not doing the sensible thing. I need to go back to freelancing.”
So then I asked myself, “Well, how do I start that again?” And I was like, “The way you started the first time, I guess.” But I wanted to be very deliberate about it. It’s different than when I was in my 20s. I have a mortgage. I have two pets. I have a car payment. So I needed to do a lot very, very fast.
So I decided, let me try and get 100 nos in a month. The aim wasn’t going to be the yeses. The aim was going to be, “What can I get behind 100 nos?” And so I had no target. I had no fixed plan. I was hoping to replace my monthly salary. And that was it.
Let’s talk a bit more about the parameters for this “100 nos” project. What ground rules did you put in place and how did you come up with them?
I did want it to be meaningful in that I wanted it to yield results. I didn’t want to just get 100 nos for the sake of it. So I said: Every opportunity I apply for, every person I ask to connect with has to be someone I see a route to either a job or the job is something I would take. On the face of it, it needs to look like something that I would take and I’d be excited about. I also couldn’t phone in an application. I had to actually put effort into it. I had to apply to it as if I wanted it, which got very hard! And I couldn’t count it as a no unless I didn’t hear back for two weeks.
That seems like an important distinction—that you were trying to put yourself out there in front of opportunities that you actually cared about. And then along the way, you shared your progress in public forums like on LinkedIn and in the Superpath community. What kind of reception did you get when you were sharing your progress?
Honestly, I was so surprised and overwhelmed, and I felt really grateful. This has been such a good experience. The day before I thought about posting it, I started to second-guess myself because I’m connected to my past clients, the people who laid me off, my friends, a bunch of people who I find very impressive.
I think it’s easy to say in retrospect, but I very well could have gotten no money. I could have gotten those 100 very quickly. Because as a freelancer that happens. You can put your best work out there for a month and sometimes that’s the nature of the game. So I was very, very nervous, and I didn’t feel good about it. But I also thought the spirit of it is pushing through discomfort. So I said, “You know, worse comes to worst I make no money and then I have a very accurate record of what freelancing life is like. And maybe I’ll make some friends who are going through the same thing.”
But from the first post everyone was just very encouraging. After the first post, a lot of people reached out and said, “I didn’t know you were back on the market,” which was great. None of those calls turned into work, but it was good to refresh those connections. I’m consistently surprised at how being honest and vulnerable attracts good things to you.
A lot of people have this hesitation to share that they’re open and looking for clients. It feels really vulnerable to put that out there. And one of the things a coach I’ve been working with recently keeps saying is, “People can’t hire you if they don’t know that you’re available and they don’t know what you do.” We’re in it every day so we feel like, “Oh, everybody knows what I do.” But no, people don’t always know. You’re not top of mind for every person in your network. And it’s okay to remind them about what you do.
I saw your posts in Superpath and on LinkedIn and I was always really excited to read them. And one of my observations was I got a little confused about what I was rooting for. If you were getting yeses, technically that’s not meeting the criteria. But that’s amazing! And if you’re getting nos, then it’s like, oh cool, you’re getting closer to meeting your goal. And I just love that framing of it that you couldn’t lose. Either way it would be a win.
Really trying to apply to that many things is very hard. But it did change my mindset in that after the first week if I got a no, I was like, “Oh, thank goodness.” Like, it was like one closer. At one point I was scrolling and I was like, “Someone say no to me.” And I think that really helped.
That leads really nicely to the next thing I wanted to ask you, which is what results can you share? How did you do in terms of meeting your goal?
I got 56 hard nos. “No time,” “Can’t expand that project,” “Not looking for that at this time.” I applied to some full-time jobs and got the standard boilerplate rejections. One came 30 seconds after I applied, so that was incredible. I was like, “No, ticked off.”
I got three paid yeses that were directly like, “I would like to do this project and in exchange for money.”
I got about 10 phone calls, one of which eventually led to work.
Then I was creating a website for my consulting work and I wanted some more recommendations. So I emailed a bunch of people saying, “Would you mind saying nice things about me?” And I was so surprised that every single one of them said yes. And it was also just a really nice thing reading them. I think that did a lot for me as a professional being like, “I actually can do this.” It’s very validating. And then a lot of the rest are ghosts.
Did the project progress as you anticipated? Were there any surprises along the way?
No, it did not go as I expected. I have to be honest. In a good way, people were a lot more open than I thought they would be. I read this tip early on to go to people with a specific ask. Like, “Can you connect me to this person? Is there any work that you need help with?” Not just, “Hey, I need help,” because that puts the burden on them.
I was surprised at how willing people were to do things that had no upside for them just because they wanted to be nice, and I think that’s because people are social creatures.
I will say I think for freelancers it’s a whole brave new world out there. Because marketing is changing so fast, people are coming to freelancers expecting a lot more answers. They’re coming asking, “Do you know about this? Can you do this? Can you help us transform the business?” I think there’s a lot more trust and maybe perhaps because teams are smaller, which I think means as an individual, I have to be much clearer on what I do and what I don’t do. So I had to say no myself to a couple of things.
Would you run the challenge again or encourage other people to? And if so, would you change anything about it?
I would do less nos. I would aim for 50 nos just because I actually only finished getting 100 requests sent out with one day to spare, which meant it was impossible to get 100 nos, because if you even get one yes, there’s no way to meet it.
I’d also just warn people not to take my results as automatic, because I think I’m really lucky. I had an established practice. I was in an agency before. It wasn’t like I was going into this cold.
I worry I might give the impression that you’re a failure if you don’t manage to get the income goal you set for yourself, for example. But any freelancer knows that your success one month has nothing to do with your success the other month. Or your success today has nothing to do with your success tomorrow. It might be longer than a month before you get to your goal, and I wouldn’t judge myself if it took longer than a month.
Any final thoughts you’d like to share?
It’s scary to put yourself out there. It’s scary to hear no. It’s scary to say, “I am going to go get rejected over and over and over.” A lot of people said no to me. 56 people said they did not wanna be friends with me. Well, that’s not true…
In a professional way.
Yes. I couldn’t sit with them. But, I think one thing that halfway through this was really healthy for me to realize is that I could be invested in all those opportunities. I could be excited about all those opportunities, but I didn’t have to be attached to the outcome of it. You can let yourself feel both things. You can say, “This would be great. I would be really good at it. It’ll be okay if I don’t get it.” It sounds really simple when you say it, but it took me two weeks to learn. Two solid weeks of hearing no before I was like, “I’m okay with that.”
I love Farah’s story because she took some seemingly negative circumstances—a layoff, an inhospitable job market, regularly recurring rejection—and found a way to put a positive spin on it. Not only did she turn it into a game, but she used it as the launchpad for her freelance business. I hope to be able to channel at least some of Farah’s positive mindset and try to create that distinction between being invested and attached to rejections.
Find Farah on LinkedIn or learn more about her freelance business here.
Main photo by Daniel Herron on Unsplash.