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“I take rejection as someone blowing a bugle in my ear to wake me up and get going, rather than retreat.” – Sylvester Stallone

Humans are very social creatures. We like to engage with each other and we like to do this frequently and with enthusiasm. This can lead to many wonderful experiences, such as lifelong friendships, romance, business partnerships, personal development and spiritual growth.

These engagements have a potential downside, too – the possibility of rejection.

The desire to ‘fit in’ – to be accepted and wanted – is strong. American psychologist Abraham Maslow arranged human needs into a ladder. Basic physical needs – air, water, food and sex – are at the bottom, followed by security and safety and then our social needs, like the desire to belong, to be loved and accepted. Maslow suggests unfulfilled needs on the lower rungs prevent us from moving to the next step. We need to address problems or issues before we advance up the ladder.

Over time, I’ve become pretty good at handling rejection. I’d like to say I’ve always been like this - that at some early, Mozart-esque age I crafted a series of rules and bulletin points to act as a guideline to handling rejection in all its forms. That from day one, I was in complete and total control.

The truth is I’ve become good at dealing with rejection because I’ve been rejected. A lot.

I’m certainly not alone. We’ve all had our share, even the beautiful people. The Brad Pitt’s and Scarlet Johansson’s of this world seem to have it under control, but rejection comes in many forms. It isn’t all about relationships and it isn’t just about being hot (although, as it seems with most of life’s challenges, being hot certainly doesn’t hurt).

Indeed, one constant appears with comforting regularity in the early lives of the great is an encounter with failure from which they benefited. Here are some well-known examples:

1) Claudia Schiffer. Although it’s hard to believe, Claudia grew up feeling awkward and unattractive. Being unpopular compounded her fears. By age 20, she was an international supermodel and widely regarded as one of most beautiful women in the world. At 37, she has appeared on over 900 magazine covers – a record for all models.

2) Jennifer Hudson. After being rejected by Simon Cowell (“She’s out of her depth.”) and the audience in 2004 on American Idol, Jennifer could’ve just disappeared into anonymity. Instead, she channeled her feelings of rejection and isolation into a positive, securing a lead role in Dreamgirls (2006), for which she won an Academy Award for her performance as Effie White.

Hudson states, "I don't believe in looking back, that's in the past. It's part of my history and I'm proud of it. But, hey, I took it as a lesson and I've moved on. I have never experienced anything to the extent of what Effie went through, but everybody has been rejected. That was my closest rejection so I used that!"

3) Michael Jordan. Sophomore year, Michael was rejected from his high school basketball team. Think about it – what if he’d just quit? What would it have meant for basketball and athletic excellence if the greatest player the game has ever seen had given up? Jordan didn’t quit. He spent that entire summer practicing, turned himself into a complete player, grew four inches (probably through sheer will), and the rest, as they say, is history.

“I know fear is an obstacle for some people, but it is an illusion to me,” Jordan would later say, “Failure always made me try harder next time.”

If everybody just up at the first sign of any kind of obstacle, what progress could we possibly have made as a species?

The common theme is that each of these individuals chose to turn an early negative into a life-defining positive. Any one of them could have taken those rejections and given up, but they chose to use them in a more enlightened sense and make the rejection work for them.

What’s the important lesson here? Choice. We all have a choice in how we handle rejection, and whether we succumb to its barbed but largely superficial sting, or learn from the experience and grow, preparing ourselves for the next encounter.

Later this week, I’ll write about rejection in terms of romantic relationships - something we’ve all experienced no matter how hard we try to avoid it.