Believe It

The hustling continued. And continued. And continued. I sent email after email and left voice mail after voice mail with as much passion and excitement in each message as if it were the very first time I’d contacted that person. I would find people’s assistants on LinkedIn or elsewhere online and contact them too. The rejection repeated over and over, for years. From Sephora, and ULTA Beauty, and Nordstrom, and all the major department stores. Then one day, I FINALLY got through to Allen Burke’s assistant. The then head of beauty at QVC, the largest TV shopping channel in the country, Allen Burke is a legend. He was the guy responsible for transforming that old, often cheesy image of selling products on TV into a new image, and he is credited with convincing luxury beauty companies to partner with QVC. Under his leadership, almost all of the most coveted department store brands started selling their products on QVC and do to this day. Because I thought women were tired of products not working for them, I felt like QVC would be the perfect place to show, live on TV, that our products actually worked on real women. I all but begged his assistant to set up a call with him. She promised me she would relay my message, and that he would give me a call back if QVC had any interest. I followed up by sending (yet another) package of product samples and copies of press articles about our products.

As the weeks went by, I was in a constant state of suspense, obsessively watching the phone, the way you do when you had the best first date ever but don’t want to be the first one to text or call. I couldn’t think about anything else. Except I couldn’t stop thinking about everything else. The mounting expenses and our mounting burnout. My fear of losing not just all of our savings but the small amount of money we’d taken from three investors who were friends and family. And the devastating possibility of having to give up this dream. Then, the phone rang!

“Hi, Jamie, this is Allen Burke from QVC.” My heart raced, but I mustered up all of my confidence and enthusiastically said hello. He got right to the point. He said he had reviewed our products and packaging with his team of beauty buyers, and the consensus was that we were “not the right fit for QVC or for the QVC customer.” Just like that, in a matter of seconds, another gut-wrenching no. My heart sank. As I paced the bedroom in our apartment/office, tears streamed down my face. I knew that he couldn’t see them, and I hoped he couldn’t sense them either. I asked him for feedback and input and put in one more pitch, telling him I really believed their customers would love our products. He thanked me for loving QVC but confirmed again it was a no. I thanked him for his time. After the call ended, I got under the covers in bed and cried. And cried. And cried. And prayed. And cried some more. Then, the weirdest feeling came over me: I realized that no matter how hard it got, I wasn’t going to quit. I just wasn’t going to give up. It didn’t make sense in my head, but it did make sense in my gut. My intuition was still telling me to keep going.

One of the best things I’ve ever done is build a toolbox of things that I can pull from when I get knocked down. A toolbox I can use when staring rejection in the face, when I need to remember who I am and why I’m doing what I’m doing. One that’s filled with tools that help me believe in myself, even in moments when it feels like no one else does. It’s an imaginary toolbox, but it’s filled with real-life stories and messages and quotes and prayers that I can pull from to solve problems. I keep this toolbox in my head, in written form on my computer, and sometimes in the Notes app of my phone. It’s free to do, and it’s something I’ve built upon and edited year after year. If this sounds like something you need and don’t yet have, an easy way to start is to highlight quotes or stories that deeply impact you, and save them all in one place that you can reference quickly.

This toolbox is part of how I knew in that moment, as I lay there under the covers crying over the painful rejection from Allen Burke at QVC, that I wasn’t going to give up. I read quote after quote that inspired me and reminded me that almost all great things come with opposition. I read stories I had saved for times like this one, of underdogs who overcame rejection to triumph. I prayed and asked for clarity over whether I should keep going, despite all the rejection. And I really focused on my WHY. See, a lot of people set goals, and even have a goal-setting journal, but I’ve learned that for me that isn’t enough. I believe you have to attach a WHY to any goal, and that WHY has to be so meaningful to you that no matter how hard things get, your belief in your WHY is powerful enough to withstand the hard times when things don’t go your way.

Lying there under my covers, I remembered the deep pain I had felt as a little girl when I saw images of beauty that made me feel like I wasn’t good enough. I was determined to change this, for other little girls out there who were about to start learning to doubt themselves, and for every grown woman who still does. I was determined to use up every ounce of myself, and every ounce of fight I had inside myself, before tapping out of accomplishing that mission. Before falling asleep that night, I wrote these words and texted them to myself, vowing to read them each day until I didn’t need the reminder anymore: Know your why, then fly, girl, fly.

Excerpted from Believe IT by Jamie Kern Lima. Copyright © 2021 by Jamie Kern Lima. Excerpted with permission by Gallery Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.