the zurkie show - stop chasing what’s not for you

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

your rejections don't define you. the way in which you move past them does. maybe that "no" was the best thing that could have ever happened to you.it's all in the way we view our own adversity.sending you lots of love and peaaaaaaaaaace!https://stan.store/thezurkieshow

You were so excited to ask them. You almost thought it was a lock that they would say yes. That you could take them out on a boba date. And then you could go get lunch somewhere cute. And then you could go sit in a parking garage that overlooks the little area in your city. And it would be romantic. But before any of that happened, they said no. And now you feel stupid.

That's always how you feel when you get rejected. You feel stupid because you assumed that it was going to be an automatic yes. You assumed that you had it in the bag. All of your friends gassed you up and they said, Gurley, he's into you. I even did a manifestation for you and guess what? It's a yes. But it was a no.

How do you recover from something like that? How do you actually willingly sit down and say, okay, it is what it is? It's not what it is. I wanted them to say yes. And them doesn't necessarily mean it's a person. It could be a place. It could be a thing. And oftentimes it could be an opportunity.

I've had a lot of rejections in my life that were hard to take. I had a lot of them. I've had a lot that just like, we're soul-crushing. You apply to a job, you go through four rounds of interviews for them to say we've put the position on hold. No, you, that is the biggest cap. I've ever heard. But it wasn't until I remember my mom telling me something

after I had a failed date. I went on a date with a person I really, really liked in theory. And I was like, man, it would be an honor to be able to date them. And they were like, you know what? I see you just as a friend. You're like a brother to me. I don't want to be your brother. I want to be your boyfriend.

If I was your boyfriend, I'd never let you go. But they let me go on some passenger. Let her go. So I was in this position where I was talking to my mom, and I'm like, mom, I got rejected, what do I do? And she was just like, Zirki, it's a great thing you got rejected. I'm like, no, it's not.

It's not a great thing. I'm going to get laughed at at school. One, two, It kind of hurt my masculinity. I thought this person liked me because I was macho. And it turns out, no, they don't like me. And I remember my mom saying this to me, and it's something that has become deeply burned into my mental hard drive,

especially when I go through any kind of adversity or hardship, which happens all the time every single day. Get ready for it. Rejection is redirection. Rejection is re-direction. direction. Okay, Mama, relax. What do you mean when I get rejected?

It means I am being redirected. My mom explained to me that in our lives there are certain things that we might feel entitled to, certain opportunities, a dream person, a dream school, a dream city, a dream career. And oftentimes we will

put a chokehold on that vision of what we want, of that thing that we desire. And when it comes down to it, sometimes that thing isn't good for us. And we think it's good for us, right? Because we are so entrenched in our own thoughts.

And we think, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is something I need. RBC Training Ground has discovered potential in over 20,000 Canadian athletes and counting. Your story could be next. If you've got the drive, they'll help you find your path to the Olympics. Let's see what you've got. Sign up for free at rbc trainingground.ca. But what if that thing is actually going to do you more harm?

It's easy for you to say that, right? Because we don't really know for certain, right? Nothing is for certain. I thought it was for certain that you could go to Chili's and spend, under $60. Try that for me. Try that for me. But the more I started to experience rejection, in hindsight looking back, I realized,

wow, if I had not gotten rejected here, I wouldn't have been able to prepare for this opportunity. And in the moment, it feels terrible. In the moment, you almost lose faith entirely. and anything that you're doing, you feel as if, oh, I got rejected! You just want to scream into a pillow or something. You want to punch a wall. I've been there.

But when you start realizing that rejection is a good thing, and sometimes it can almost protect you from certain opportunities that maybe you weren't ready for, or maybe they weren't healthy for you, that perspective shift will allow you to become way, more aware of other opportunities that are meant to be experienced by you. It will make you realize, wait a minute, this person, you know, if they're rejecting me, okay, they don't, they don't want me, that's cool. I would much rather have somebody that wants me that, you know,

they see eye to eye with me. Yeah, this person's really hot and, you know, I'd be creeping on their posts sometimes, you know, trying to be like, hey, trying to shoot some suburb. liminels, you know, hey, we've been there. You post their favorite song on your story. I've done that. I've played these games before. Squid game. I've played these games before. Unk has done it. But it's all taught me. Every time I have been in a situation where I get dumped, I get rejected, I go through some kind of heartbreak.

looking back I'm always like wow that moment opened up so many different doors for me and I'm not telling you to remember this the instance you get rejected like the moment someone breaks up with you or the moment that the coach comes over and says hey you probably need to find a different sport because this is not working out for you you don't have to be like oh rejection is redirection no no you can feel the emotions of being upset that's like you you have to you have to feel upset you have to feel worked up that is like a normal reaction. But when you look back at it, I think a lot of us look at rejection with the sour taste in our mouth. We think like, someone did us really, really wrong, right? And we'd like,

a wolf comes out of us. What am I talking about? You know what I'm talking about. You just, you have resentment. And I don't think that having resentment towards rejection does you any good. if anything, it sucks more energy out of you that is important for other things. Because if you hyper fixate on every time you've been rejected, you are closing the door and on all the potential opportunities that you might have in the future of people who are worth your time, of opportunities that you're meant to have. Everyone I've ever met that's in a position of, you know, some kind of success or maybe they feel like they've lived a good life.

All of them had this idea of like if it's meant to be, it's meant to be. If it's not, I'm not going to sit and wait for things to happen. I'm not going to just be like, oh, I feel sorry for myself that I got rejected. I'm going to treat it as that wasn't meant to be, and that's cool. I'm going to find something that is. Want to go electric without sacrificing fun? That's the Volkswagen ID4. All electric and thoughtfully designed to elevate your modern lifestyle.

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There's nothing about feeling that way that is like good for me. No, I got rejected. I got rejected and it was a redirection into the area that I'm supposed to go into. Oftentimes, like, rejections gave birth to a new idea or a new perspective of doing something. Maybe you have been hyperfixated on getting a consulting job out of. of college because everyone has told you that that is what successful people do and they move to a big city and blah blah blah blah blah you know the rest and you've gotten rejected from every single firm you got a from deloitte they said no you got a from boston consulting group they said no

you even got a from a consulting company that you you randomly found on a job search and they said we've decided to go with another candidate. I know you got rejected. No one can tell you otherwise, but you got to do something about it. And maybe, in hindsight, you don't want to be a consultant. It's not what you want to do.

Maybe in hindsight, all those dream schools that you're applying to, you don't even want to go there. You want to go somewhere else. Getting rejected is a great time to really reflect on is this what I want? Because if there is something

that you really, really want, no matter how many times you get rejected, you will keep going. You'll be like, huh, okay, let's keep going. But if you don't have that and you feel kind of like slighted and you feel as if I have to do this again,

it's okay to hang up the boots. It's fine. Maybe it's time to transfer to a new team. You've been sitting on the bench so long at Chelsea. It's time to go to A.C. Milan and play Seria A. You know what I'm saying? You've been sitting on the bench. You are not even a rotation player. It's time to get traded.

And you will even get rejected when you are at the tippy, tippy, tippy top of whatever you're doing. Luca. Luca. Remember Luca Donchich. if you're ever like, well, I'm doing great. I can't get rejected. Yes, you can. Yes, you can. And I feel for the guy.

But he's going to deal with it. He's going to be good. Hopefully, I don't know. Luke, I hope you're doing good. Damn, that was rough. I woke up, I don't even watch basketball like that. But I woke up and I was like, what in the world just happened? Like, it didn't even make sense.

I thought it was a troll. Wow. Crazy You will Get rejected You will Rosen lasagna Medium power

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and enjoy via rail love the way will all of it sting in the same way no there's going to be rejections that

are so like whatever okay that person said that about me okay I didn't get this opportunity I don't care but the big ones will hurt maybe there's somebody in your mind that you really want to be friends with

you want as a mentor you look up to and you meet them and you realize they're human and what do we know about humans they're not perfect and you get an ick or you go

oh no no not you too no no no no no no no no maybe you ask hey could I be you know a part of your team can I be a mentee

and they're like no oh Rough rejection. But would you rather be with somebody or do something that doesn't feel right or it feels like that opportunity is disingenuous in some way, then actually like reshift your focus and your energy towards something that does in a certain sense fit you better and love you back? I think a lot of us do things and get into things because we want to prove to ourselves that we

we are like rejection proof when I think that you need to fall down the stairs once in a while like you know that family guy clip where like endless falling down the stairs you need to do that

you need to fall down the stairs once in a while for you to be like all right I know how to get up now and I know how to go on these stairs the right way you know too many times

in my life I've been afraid of getting rejected and I didn't even put myself out there I didn't even try because I was just afraid. And I wish I had looked at it in a different way, in a different manner. Now I know that, okay, if I go up to somebody and I try to chat them up and they don't want to talk to me, I'm getting redirected. Not meant to talk to them. Now I know if I try something and it goes horribly wrong and I'm like, I did not like that at all, but I'm willing to make changes and see it through.

Okay. I'm on the right path. I need to kind of shift a little bit. I got to go this way instead of that way, you know. But I know I'm on the right path. It's kind of like when you're telling your homie to flick you up because you want to have some cool picks, you know what I'm saying. Hey, mom's asking for a picture, you've got to deliver.

That's what it is. And you take a photo and you look at it and you're like, the angle's not right. My chin looks extremely chopped. My hair line is pushed back in this photo somehow. I don't even know how that's possible. But I see the vision. I see the vision. I just need a different angle at that.

Great. You're redirecting yourself. You're figuring out, okay, I got to shift it this way. All right, I got to crop it that way. All right, you know, it won't be a one shoe fits all. It won't be just, oh, this is, here you go. There are so many different ways to approach a certain problem. There are so many different ways of approaching being rejected.

And I guess what I'm just trying to ask you to do is just consider the fact that it wasn't meant to be. consider the fact that this wasn't meant to happen in this way. And yeah, you can say, Zirky, you don't know that. You don't know that. What if this was my one shot? Sure. Maybe this was your one shot at this thing, at this point of time. But if you weren't ready to take it, you weren't ready to seize it because you were lazy,

unconcerned, you felt like you had an ego, you couldn't take it, then you weren't ready for it. That's what it is. You weren't ready for it. If you were ready for it, you would take it. You would seize it. When a country's productivity cycle is broken, people feel it in their paychecks, their communities, their futures.

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We have to go through tropes of adversity and ups and downs, the valleys. We need to. We need to in order to know what's good for us and what's not. Like that is so insanely important. And the more that you delay it, the harder it will be later down in your life to deal with these kind of things.

And it never gets easier. Well, it does get easier. I take that back. It gets easier to know that the rejection is just redirection. The actual feelings of getting rejected, yeah, they suck. But if you do it enough, you get to a point where you're like, eh, all right, wasn't meant to be. The first couple, hard, devastating.

You ask somebody to prom. They say no. That sucks. You know, you try to take a player on, one v one, right? in front of the goalie box. You want to score an upper 90 to end the high school game in OT. You try to juke him out and he takes the ball from you, boots it out. You guys tie. Yeah, rough, right? But okay. Now you know what you need to work on. Now you know that you've got to get the right kind of pivot so you can fake your defender, go right, and then slot it in. Bottom right,

boom. You're in the local newspaper as the hero of your high school soccer team. You know, we oftentimes fixate on the highs of the greats in our, in our lifetime. We always look at like the highlight reel that they have. Nobody talks about how many shots MJ missed. Nobody talks about the chances that Messi missed. No, we watched the free kick compilations, even though he would miss and he would play bad games. But he kept going. he kept going

it's easy for me to sit here and say that every time you get rejected look at it as redirection it's harder to put it in practice it is it is very difficult to put into practice but I think the first step is just being aware that you don't

have to stack up your rejections and let that define you you don't because if you had done that and you continue to do that, you will just look at yourself as a walking rejection. And you will not even put yourself in a position to get accepted. If you go off of all the negative things that have happened in your life, you'll continue to see the world in a lens that is negative.

That is based on all the evidence that, okay, I keep getting, you know, rejected. But the good thing about rejection and about opportunities is there are a lot of them. We have a lot of opportunities in our lives. And it's one thing when you consistently get rejected. Okay, maybe it's on you. You have to internalize it and look, okay, why is this happening to me? Because, all right, well, a couple of rejections, A, that happens. But if I'm getting like hundreds, that's kind of a lot.

It's like, what am I doing? In the same vein, you can stack up evidence that you win every day. You can stack it up mentally. You make your bed every morning. Small win. That is such a, oh my gosh, duh, I make my bed every morning. Not everyone does. Maybe you've never done that.

But that could be a great way to start the morning. You give yourself some time to think every morning five minutes while you get ready while you look in the mirror, put some sea salt water in your hair to get curly. I'll know y'all be doing that. on not all you all have perms and curly hair or you're doing your makeup in the morning cool it's great you just gave yourself time you did something for yourself stack up another win let's say you held the door open for somebody it's another win and they said thank you or even if you if they didn't say thank you because there are people like that in this world which is insane to me it's another win you have another piece of evidence that you are doing good things and that you

aren't rejecting yourself right and maybe all of these little wins over time stack up to a certain opportunity where there's somebody that's handsome and finally you kind of have the confidence you've built up a little bit of confidence here of like i'm having a good day i'm doing good things all these small things are kind of bunching up. I'm just going to go up and say hi. And you do. And they say hi back. And you say, what song are you listening to? And then a couple minutes later, they send you a Spotify playlist and you go and stock their

entire page and find out that their music taste is awesome. And who knows? Maybe you go to a concert together. And who knows? Maybe then you get a double, double from in and out together on a beautiful, summer night. Could be you. It could be you. But if you view rejection

and everything that's happened in your past as bad, negative, terrible, then you won't get redirected into a better place. Onto a better road. Think of it this way. I'll leave it to you

like this. Sometimes on Google Maps when you're driving your road that you want to take is congested with traffic that will slow you down. And so Google Maps, it makes you divert. It says, we have found a better option for your traveling. Save 10 minutes. You have an option, right?

You can take that road, and I'll save you some time. And who knows? You might not go down the same road. the same route that you wanted to go down because, I don't know, let's say there's a certain coffee shop that you really like that's on that road. There's a Dutch bros, and you want to get a golden eagle with soft top and marshmallows. My order. And you kind of look at it and you're like, dang, that sucks, but I do want to save that 10 minutes and who knows, maybe I'll find something else. And so you take that exit and you go down that other path and it is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,

road with trees and the sun is hitting perfectly and you're playing some kind of playlist that you made you know freshman year high school and you're like dang you're feeling that nostalgia and you're experiencing something that you wouldn't have never experienced on that other road you got redirected you might look at him be like I got rejected I could have kept going at that thing but maybe it was meant to go the way that it did maybe it was just meant to take you down a different path for you to see something new, something different about yourself that you didn't know before. But the choice is your Zerky Show. The choice will always be yours. But I think if you get rejected, it's really just a redirection, Zirkey show. Quick

announcement, I have a new show coming out called Mail Time with Zirky. If you want to be a part of it, send me a question, a letter. This is my P.O. Box. Tap. I'd love to see what you come up with. I'd love for you to have the chance to be a part of this show. This is the way to address it. You know how it goes. Also, did you know that the Zirky Show is everywhere you go? What?

That is correct. You can watch it, you can scroll it, you can stream it. The choice is yours. We have great communities everywhere all around the interwebs. But just know, the Zirky Show is here to stay every day, and that will not change. do the things that bring you joy, try something new. If you don't know what to try, learn a new language. Language is like the key to opening a chest of culture.

You can learn so much about yourself and others through just knowing how to speak to a whole new region of the world. Other than that, if you are trying something new, just know I believe in you, and likewise, I trust you, I appreciate you, and Zirki Show, I hope you're doing good. Oh, and, of course, I am sending you plenty of love. Peace.