Carlos' blog

The right attitude towards rejection is a character builder and despite all of its negative connotations, it’s not always a bad thing. You have to go through it to understand it.

As part of Toky, I felt it numerous times—more than 10 times—and I know this because I used to count them. Some of them hurt a lot that incapacitated me for a few days and some passed quickly.

The ones that hurt the most came from YCombinator. We applied four times between 2015 and 2017 and got rejected immediately the first two, and in the last two, we were invited to the in-person interview in Mountain View but with the same result at the end.

Despite the outcome, every single thing that came after these events were unquestionably good because we didn’t see rejection as a failure and we learned to understand that getting rejected was an unavoidable part of being a founder.

The last time it happened was in November 2017. The interview was at around 4 pm and it lasted 10 minutes as usual, but while waiting for the acceptance call we walked over 10 kilometers because our minds couldn’t think of anything else.

At around 8 pm PDT we received the rejection email. It was a nightmare. We spent the rest of the night lamenting ourselves for having failed once again.

We talked about it and tried to rationalize the reasons behind this decision with us and with the team. We went to bed early and we mourned privately the rest of the night because we knew that the next day was a new day and that we owed to our team and to ourselves to get back on our feet and go back to making Toky get to the next level.

This night was almost three years ago and it triggered a much bigger and important event for Toky that was not going to happen if it wasn’t for our exposure to challenges, failure, and even suffering.

I hope my perspective makes you change yours for the better and makes you start seeing rejection as something that is not always bad. Sometimes, it’s just the previous step to something great coming your way.

During this time was when I also realized that not being in Silicon Valley was not necessarily a death sentence as long as you accepted this as a fact. This realization inspired this blog post.

Back in March, I decided I was going to resume writing for this blog because I wanted to get better at it. I felt that losing the habit of constantly writing my thoughts made me lose the ability to communicate effectively.

With the COVID pandemic raging, I allocated every Saturday morning to writing and I sat in front of my computer, some times literally for hours before I was able to come up with something to write about. I was determined to create the habit of writing even if that meant forcing it to happen.

I don’t know if this is the right way of doing it or not, but it is working for me. I feel like every Saturday when I sit down to write, the ideas and words flow more and more easily as time passes.

This has been my technique for creating “good” habits all my life. I forced myself to make things I initially rarely enjoyed until they became a habit and stopped being a pain.

The second step of this endeavor is to study how professional writers write, how they express their voices in a way that doesn’t seem copied or regurgitated from someone else’s writing, how do they make the experience of reading them feel fresh.

It’s going to be a long journey for sure, maybe it’ll take years until I become any good. No one is reading me right now but that’s fine because I am already feeling the improvements and that’s enough feedback for me to continue down this path. Anything that is good in life takes effort.

I am determined to come out of this pandemic better than when I entered it.

The world can be an unfair place where you don’t always get what you deserve and where you don’t get points just for trying.

I’m sure that at least once in your life you had the feeling that you worked harder than someone else and yet you didn’t get that thing you wanted despite deserving it more. It’s a strong feeling that can create resentment towards people or life if you don’t learn to understand why it happens.

There are a lot of unfair advantages that people are born with that are not even considered when it comes to comparing people’s achievements in life. A person born into a wealthier family has access to better opportunities than another person without that fortune but when weighting their life achievements this is never acknowledged making it an apples-to-oranges kind of comparison in detriment of the self-esteem of the less fortunate person who probably had to fight much harder to get where they got.

The people that had to work hard only to get to the point where other people started life deserve more recognition and more praise. We live in a society that doesn’t care about your struggles and will judge you in a biased way putting you—as a lightweight fighter—in the same ring to fight the sorts of Mike Tysons and then shame you when you lose.

This entire situation can make you feel like you already lost without even having started making you not even want to try but it is important that you fight this feeling and find the motivation to work hard, not to prove society wrong, but to prove yourself you are capable of achieving great things.

We might not become the next Elon Musk, but it cannot be for lack of trying. Even if we don’t get there the journey will very much be worth it.

There were times when I felt unfit for running my own business and for leading the people working with me. I looked for answers online and everyone here seemed much more prepared than I was, with much more experience and having gotten in my position 10 years earlier than me. I didn’t realize back then that I was comparing the peak of their careers against mine that was just getting started. You probably are too.

Remember these thoughts when you feel bad about your own career or when reading TechCrunch or Forbes makes you feel like an underachiever. Don’t let the unfair world discourage you and keep on giving a good fight.