No pizza for you!

November 11, 2021

Proma Nautiyal

Hey there,

Sorry for the scary subject line, but guess how scary it must have been to hear something like this (or similar) at night, when you are really hungry, in a foreign land, whose language you don’t speak.

This happened on my first visit to Mexico City. I was jet-lagged, hungry, and already terribly homesick for some reason. It was around 9 pm, I woke up with an excruciating headache and grumbling tummy begging for food.

It was close to impossible for me to go to the mall next door and get a quick bite. Instead, I picked up the hotel phone to place an order for a chicken pizza.

Anyways, the conversation that followed was with the pizza lady who clearly was having a day as bad as I was and was clearly irritated by the fact that I couldn’t speak Spanish. After about 3 minutes of phone-based, semi-dumb charades, she said “No PIZZA!” and hung up…

Clearly, Sbarro was done selling pizzas cause I didn’t speak Spanish.

But what happened next was one of those moments in my life, and trust me it happens often, which makes me take a huge step without thinking much.

No, I didn’t call Pizza Hut. I looked up the map to find a place where I could learn Spanish. From scratch.

The next morning, I was off figuring my way through Mexico City’s crazy public transportation map to make way to UNAM where I registered for Spanish classes that went on for a good 1.5 years.

You might have realized now. This story is not about pizza or the pizza lady. It’s about rejection and what you make of it. The first step to dealing with rejection is understanding that there is a gap in expectations. If the gap can be filled by you, go ahead and do that.

If I could speak Spanish, yet the lady hung up on my face (highly unlikely), that situation would have called for the “Your loss!” method of dealing with rejection. Cause it would indeed be their loss as I would order from another outlet, anyways.

The thing we should not do, at any cost, when it comes to rejection or failure is BLAME. The moment we put the blame on someone else, we give them or that situation power. At no point in time do we want to do that.

To conclude, I had started ordering pizza, one month into my course, super fluently, but I completed the entire course anyways, to build it into a business skill. LATAM market is growing steadily and I wouldn’t let that client base go, would I now?

Spot your victories in the little defeats. They are totally worth it!

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Long Island Iced Lesson. It’s Friday, I thought you’d enjoy one.

Have a great weekend ahead!

Proma

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