Rejection or Regret?

Welcome to Hot Girl Breakthrough, where I provide actionable ideas and curated insights to help you do you, but better.

Today’s Breakdown

Question: Rejection or Regret?

A phenomenon with getting older is being willing to spend more money on things that you previously wouldn’t have done. I’m not referring to having more disposable income as a consequence of earning more as you progress in your career, I mean literally justifying purchases because it makes sense. I told you last week I refuse to buy cheap butter, Tupperware could be another example in which my budget knows no limit, but today’s case in point is my £60 pepper mill.

Prior to this purchase last year, I wouldn’t have been in Greta’s good books by either buying unsustainable, non-refillable pepper with built-in mills or opting for very crappy mills from the supermarket.

On a particularly run-of-the-mill Saturday, my brain decided that scouting a fancy grinder was the only way to spend my afternoon. Perusing my local cookware shop, I opted for an adjustable mill with 6 settings of coarseness. You don’t know how good life can be until you can distribute and differentiate between a soupçon or an avalanche of black pepper depending on what you’re cooking. It has been the gastronomic upgrade I didn’t know I needed.

Another bonus is the lifetime guarantee. Nothing says “we believe in our brand” more than a lifetime guarantee. I’ll be in my 80s using this grinder.

The brand in question? Peugeot. As in, the French car manufacturer. To give you a brief history lesson, in 1810 Peugeot began producing hand tools, expanding into coffee grinders in 1840, pepper grinders in 1874, and then bicycles and automobiles in 1889.

My preamble serves as a reminder that what you become known for is rarely the thing you started out doing. There are a plethora of brands and people who one day just decided to start something worlds apart from the thing they’d been doing for years.

I meet a lot of people that want to start something new. From picking up new hobbies to starting a business, you can change lanes and start as many new chapters as you want.

I imagine you have a vision board, list of goals or simply ideas in your head of things you’d love to do. And yet, you still haven’t started.

Rita Ora who started as a pop star, now also makes bed sheets and you’ve been procrastinating on starting that project you’ve wanted to do for years.

Rejection is acute, regret is chronic

For the majority of us, myself included btw, getting started is a huge hurdle. We blame busy schedules or needing more time to research but the reason we often haven’t taken the first step is fear-based:

1. Fear of failure

2. Fear of success

3. Fear of looking stupid

4. Fear or rejection

Doing something new requires change, change is scary and our brains have cleverly evolved to protect ourselves from things that feel like a threat. Unfortunately for us, our limbic brain (often called Lizard or Reptilian brain) hasn’t evolved from 1000s of years ago when threats involved things like hostile environments and predators.

Our so-called survival instinct isn’t in perfect harmony with modern life and therefore our natural inclination to start something new and scary is to delay it for as long as possible and/or paralyse us entirely to never start it all. Is starting a podcast or asking someone on a date scary? Yes. It is as scary as a chance encounter with a lion? Absolutely not.

A regret-filled life scares the shit out of me. We’ve got one precious life, there isn’t a dress rehearsal and to die without doing the things my heart yearned for makes me feel on edge.

While the idea of rejection doesn’t fill me with joy either, I can take the short-term pain and I’ll at least gain some insight. With every rejection, you begin to evaluate the reason for your rejection - every piece of feedback you receive helps you to become better. Is it not better to try and fail rather than always wondering “what if”?

Whether it’s sharing your ideas in a work meeting, singing at an open mic night or sending a cold LinkedIn message asking for advice, the simple act of asking for and doing

what we want can open up possibilities we never imagined, and rejection can lead us down unexpected paths.

Professional me would say, “nothing ventured, nothing gained”. Normal me would say, “fuck what people think and do/start/create/be the thing that will bring you joy”. Take whichever version you need.

Further resources:

One of my favourite YouTubers on overcoming the fear of getting started with a simple deep dive on social anxiety and self-perception.

This brilliant 15-minute Ted Talk is about desensitising yourself to rejection by intentionally putting yourself out there to try and get rejected.

Prefer to read? Try this 5-ish minute read instead explaining the potential benefits of exposure therapy when dealing with rejection.

The Best Web Browser

If your amount of open tabs looks like Morse code dashes, this new browser might be ideal. With a strapline “a better way to use the Internet”, Arc has a stunning interface to help you organise tabs and bookmarks.

• A sidebar cleanly houses tabs which you can categorise into different “spaces” (eg, Work, Personal, Travel) so everything has a home

• Tabs auto-archive each day (you can change the frequency) so you’re not fatigued with hundreds which you’ve not looked at in months.

• Built-in ad blocker

So far, I think it’s banging and I’ll make it my default browser for the next few weeks.

It’s completely free but annoyingly waitlist-only. I’ve got 5 invite codes so you can avoid the wait. Link here: https://arc.net/gift/bdc5561a

Breakthroughs

👕 Ganni t-shirts are the adult equivalent of shiny Pokemon cards. Of course, I don’t need another Ganni t-shirt but this one is high on my wishlist.

📱 I never thought I’d enjoy life advice from a 24-year-old on TikTok but Eli Rallo and her “rules to live by” are a big vibe.

@elirallo

Oh shes early with this one 👀 happy #june 🌈🌊⛺️

🍰 Imagine banana bread with a crumble topping. Sensational doesn’t even cut it. The Pinterst picture doesn’t do it justice. I’ve made this recipe about 5 times now but gave it a jhuzz last week by adding a layer of white chocolate before the crumble topping. Apparently crumble cakes, known as “coffee cake” are a thing in the US, can any US readers please confirm because outside of Pinterest, I’ve never seen them in the UK.

See you next week!

Rhea x

PS. Thoughts, feedback or just wanna say hi? Email me here