Don’t know who Mr. P. Hewson of Dublin, Ireland is?

Read the following rejection letter to him and his band to see one of the great rejection letters of all time.

(Hint: his band has sold over 150 million albums, the band won 22 Grammy awards, and Rolling Stone magazine ranked them in the top 25 greatest artists of all time).

If you didn’t figure it out, RSO records summarily rejected Bono and his band U2 in 1979, about a year before their first album, Boy. You know the rest.

So if you’ve been rejected lately, put yourself in the camp of Bono and U2. For that matter, the Beatles, too, who were rejected in 1962 with

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.”

— M. Smith, Decca Records

(I wrote about a few rejections that motivated me to improve myself and prove them wrong in my series “Motivating Rejections.”)

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