Free Mark McGuinness - Resilience: Facing Down Rejection by Mark McGuinness

chances are you won’t always be surrounded by people who ‘get’ what you’re trying to do. Your friends and family may be well-meaning, but if they don’t know what it’s like to pursue a dream like yours, they can subtly—or not so subtly—discourage you, by saying things like this:
“Why not get a sensible job and do [insert dream] as a hobby?”
“It’s all very well aiming high, but sooner or later you have to live in the real world.”
“I guess you need to get it out of your system.”
    So it’s absolutely essential that you find a group of fellow travellers—people who get what you are trying to do, because they are doing something similar.
    People who share your enthusiasm and build on your ideas.
    People who will introduce you to other people and resources that will help you on your journey.
    People who will be there to support you when things are tough, having gone through exactly the same thing themselves.
    People who make you feel normal.
    For a very long time, I was used to being ‘the one who’s into poetry.’ With the exception of one or two very close friends, virtually no one I knew shared my passion for poetry to anything like the same degree—even among my classmates when I was studying for an English degree! Then one day I walked through the door of the Poetry School in London. To my delight, I found myself in a room full of people who were just as obsessed as I was . It felt like coming home.
    A few years later, when I got the blogging bug and started connecting and meeting up with other social media users, it felt like we were discovering a whole new world together. These days we take it for granted that we can meet people via Facebook, Twitter, forums, and so on, and meeting up is a natural (if not inevitable) way to extend the relationship. But back then, this was all new and excitingly strange. Each time I went to a bloggers’ meetup, for my first meeting with ‘friends’ I’d known for months online, it felt like we’d been beamed down from the deck of the starship Enterprise . This was the future.
    But try as I might, it was hard to explain the good news to my friends and colleagues from ‘real life.’ Their eyes glazed over as I enthused about the brave new world. Then I finished and they would say something like, “But isn’t it antisocial to spend all that time on the computer?”
    Converting people to your point of view is hard work. Better to accept that some people will never really ‘get’ your enthusiasms, and to go in search of the people who do. Fortunately I was right about the brave new world—our hyper-connected social networks make it easier than ever to find people who share your passion.
    Seth Godin calls these groups ‘tribes.’ He points out that human beings have organized themselves into tribes for millennia. The old tribes were based on kinship and geography. The new tribes are organized around common passions—music, motorbikes, madrigals, parkour, face painting, fencing, cupcake baking, and so on. When you find your tribe, you plug in to a powerhouse of resilience.
    Your next steps:
    1. Who do you already know who shares your passion? Could it help all of you to spend more time together—face-to-face and/or online? Maybe you could organize a regular get-together, or set up a private discussion forum online. Or maybe just make more of an effort to stay in touch via phone and email.
    2. Is there a local group or class dedicated to your passion? As well as checking the usual sources, search on MeetUp.com —an online directory of groups organized by interest and location. When you find a likely group, go along and check it out.
    3. Look for online tribes. Search for forums, Facebook or LinkedIn groups, Google+ circles, and blogs dedicated to your interest. Spend a bit of time lurking to begin with, to check out the vibe and etiquette, then join the conversation.
    4. If you don’t find the kind of group you’re looking for, why not start one