Did you know you can learn something from rejection?

One time early in my career, I was given a music industry “in”,  a friend of a friend in the A&R department at a record label in Nashville.  I called and got permission to send in a demo of some songs I’d written, which I thought (on a purely objective level, of course) were pretty good. 

A few weeks later, I got a rejection letter.  It definitely stung, but I didn’t let it end there.  I actually had the nerve to call the guy at the A&R department to ask what it was that caused him to turn me down.