Jia Jiang's 100 Days of Rejection Therapy, and What Research Adds

In November 2012, Jia Jiang found a game online called Rejection Therapy, decided its 30-day version was not enough, and wrote his own list of 100 requests. The Hustle reports that he had left a six-figure job just days before his son was born to chase a startup, and BYU Magazine describes the moment that set the project off: a potential investor emailed “We’re going to pass,” and Jiang cried. He filmed each attempt and put it on YouTube.

Day 1, according to BYU Magazine, he asked a mall security officer for $100 and was refused. Day 2, he asked a Five Guys employee for a “burger refill” and was turned down. On day 3 he walked into a Krispy Kreme in Austin and asked for doughnuts shaped like the Olympic rings. The shop did not make them. An employee made them anyway and handed them over free. The video drew around five million views, a figure both BYU Magazine and The Hustle report.

Jiang’s rejection experiment is the clearest recent case of a person deliberately widening his comfort zone and writing down what happened. What it shows, and what it cannot, is more interesting than the viral version.

What did Jia Jiang actually do in his 100 days of rejection?

He made one deliberately unlikely request a day, filmed it, and posted it. The Hustle lists samples: sending a present to Santa through FedEx, making an announcement on a Southwest flight, asking PetSmart for a German Shepherd-style haircut. BYU Magazine adds pulling over a police officer and asking to be a greeter at a Starbucks.

The final tally, per The Hustle, was 51 yeses and 49 noes. BYU Magazine says roughly half were accepted. The Hustle also reports that by the end he found rejection increasingly hard to get.

The project became a TED talk, which Jiang titled “What I learned from 100 days of rejection.” The TED page describes it as proof that “simply asking for what you want can open up possibilities where you expect to find dead ends.” It became a book, too: Rejection Proof, published by Harmony on April 14, 2015, according to Penguin Random House. The publisher says his TEDx talk has over ten million views.

A working definition worth quoting on its own: rejection therapy is the practice of making small, safe-to-fail requests on purpose so that the fear of hearing no gets measured against what actually happens.

Why was the Krispy Kreme request so surprising?

Because the request was built to fail. Jiang asked for a product that, by his account, the shop did not sell, with a short turnaround. Sources differ on small details of the exchange. The Time newsfeed link I tried to open returned an error, so I am relying on BYU Magazine, The Hustle and the publisher’s description. All three agree on the main point: the answer was yes, and the doughnuts were free.

Two features of the story matter more than the free doughnuts.

First, the employee had no protocol for the request and improvised. Jiang’s later lesson, as BYU Magazine reports it, is that the person asking carries some responsibility for making the other person comfortable, and that acknowledging someone’s doubts makes agreement more likely. That is an observation from one man’s 100 tries, which is a useful field note and not a rule.

Second, the camera. The video was the point, because Jiang filmed everything for accountability. BYU Magazine says he filmed each attempt to keep himself accountable, and the log that came out of it is a useful part of the method.

Does research back up the idea that people say yes more than we expect?

On the narrow question of asking for help, yes, and with real numbers. Francis Flynn and Vanessa Lake published six studies in 2008 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (volume 95, issue 1, pages 128-143). The abstract on the Stanford Graduate School of Business site reports that in studies 1 through 3 participants underestimated by as much as 50% how likely others were to comply with a direct request, across experimental and real-world settings.

Flynn described the concrete cases in a Stanford GSB interview. In campus studies, people overestimated by about 50% how many strangers they would need to approach to collect a given number of yeses. Requests included borrowing a stranger’s phone, filling in a questionnaire and being walked to the gym. In a fundraising sample, Team in Training volunteers expected to approach about 50% more people than they needed, and expected average donations to be $17 lower than they turned out to be.

The explanation in the paper is about whose costs get counted. Studies 4 and 5 swapped people between the asker’s and the helper’s seat, and the same misjudgment showed up. Study 6 found that askers weigh the social costs of refusing less than helpers do. Askers focus on the effort of saying yes. Helpers feel the awkwardness of saying no, because refusing a direct face-to-face request makes them look bad. Flynn puts the practical lesson this way: “you should pay more attention to how your request is being made than to the size of your request.” He also reports that askers wrongly expected hints and flyers to beat a direct ask.

Jiang’s 51 yeses fit that picture. They do not prove it, and the next section covers why.

Where does the rejection therapy story overreach?

Several places, and a rigorous reader should hold them in mind.

It is one person with no comparison group. Jiang chose his requests, performed them on camera, and told the story afterward. Nobody randomised which asks he made or measured his fear before and after on a scale. The reported “I got braver” is a self-report. His quote in BYU Magazine, “The fear of rejection is far worse than rejection itself, because it stops us from trying things,” is a conclusion from his experience, and a plausible one, but not a measured result.

The sample of 100 is not a random sample of the world. Many requests were crafted to be amusing on video, and the people who said yes may have been charmed by the camera or by Jiang’s manner. His method of staying and talking, as in the Five Guys burger-refill episode where BYU Magazine says he joked with the employee to ease the awkwardness, probably raised his yes rate. Someone without that skill may see a lower one.

Flynn and Lake studied requests for help, not outrageous demands. A phone call, a questionnaire, a donation: those are ordinary asks. The finding that people underestimate compliance does not stretch automatically to a request for custom doughnuts or a haircut for a dog. The more a request costs the helper, the less the finding should be trusted. I could not open the full text of the 2008 paper, only its abstract and Flynn’s interview, so I cannot tell you how the effect varied with the size of the ask.

Fear estimates may not shrink to zero. Related work on conversations with strangers, covered in a post on the Sandstrom and Boothby seven-study analysis, found that people’s fears ran ahead of how conversations actually went, and that post’s summary adds that tips for improving the conversations barely helped. Experience seems to be the teacher, which is Jiang’s argument, but I found no evidence here that one particular training routine works best.

What does novelty research say about a more exciting life?

Jiang’s project is also a novelty experiment: 100 days of situations he had never been in. Two lines of research suggest why that might feel different from a routine, with the caveat that both are small lab findings.

Nico Bunzeck and Emrah Düzel reported in Neuron in 2006 (volume 51, issue 3, pages 369-379) that activity in the substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area tracked how new a picture was, not rarity, emotion or task relevance. Their abstract also says novelty improved learning. It tells you the brain treats newness as a distinct signal. It does not tell you that a life with more new things feels more exciting, which is a larger leap.

Arthur Aron and colleagues (2000) tested couples in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (volume 78, pages 273-284). By the abstract, couples who did a seven-minute novel, arousing task together reported larger gains in relationship quality than those who did a mundane one, in three lab experiments. I read this only as an abstract on a secondary listing, so I cannot confirm sample sizes or effect sizes.

Put the two together carefully. Novelty is registered by the brain as distinct, and in at least one social context a short dose of it lifted how people rated their relationships. That supports the idea of deliberately seeking small new things. It does not support a promise about a month of daring requests.

How could you run your own small version of Jiang’s experiment?

The most useful thing in Flynn and Lake is not “ask more.” It is the prediction error. You can measure your own.

1. Write a list of ten asks with low downside. A seat change, a discount, a favour from a coworker, a request to reschedule. Make them real needs, since a pointless ask tends to feel like theatre. Keep them to things that cost the other person little.
2. Before each one, write your odds. “I think 3 in 10 people would say yes.” This is the step most people skip, and it is the only one that gives you data.
3. Ask directly and in person where you can. Flynn’s finding about hints and flyers suggests a direct request outperforms what askers expect.
4. Record the outcome in one line, including how it felt. Yes or no, plus a number from 1 to 10 for how awful the moment was.
5. After ten, compare predictions to outcomes. If your predicted yes rate was lower than your real one, you have a personal version of the 2008 result. If it was not, you have learned something too: either your asks were too costly or you are better calibrated than average.

The recording matters for the same reason Jiang filmed. A task that exists only in your head has no witness and no record, so it shrinks on a bad day. A written or filmed log makes it harder to quietly skip. That logic is the one behind the five ordinary places where everyone can see whether you followed through, from a contribution graph to a sign-up sheet.

The same pattern shows up in the most basic daily commitment there is. DontSnooze applies it to the alarm: when it fires you have 30 seconds to record a video showing you are up, and if you do not, a random photo from your camera roll goes to friends you chose.

If the scary part is imagining the worst case, Tim Ferriss’s exercise of writing out what could go wrong, how you would prevent it and how you would repair it is a sensible companion, and a walkthrough of it applied to one alarm clock shows how small it can be.

What should you take from the doughnut story?

Treat it as a good hypothesis with a good demonstration. Jiang’s tally of 51 yeses out of 100 is a story about his project, not a rate you will get. The sturdier result is the one from Flynn and Lake: the people asking guess wrong about the people answering, and they guess wrong in the pessimistic direction by as much as half in some of the studies, with a direct ask holding up better than hinting.

The cheap move is to test your own estimate. If your life feels flat, it may be partly because a list of unasked questions has been quietly shrinking it: the table you did not request, the project you did not pitch, the person you did not invite. A ten-ask log with predictions costs a week and some mild embarrassment, and at the end you will know your actual number.