"I Pinned My First Rejection Letter to My Kitchen Wall." The Real Research on Grit in Women Entrepreneurs.

"I pinned my 1st rejection letter to my kitchen wall because it gave me something in common with all my fave writers."

J.K. Rowling said that years after the fact, once the joke could finally land. At the time, it didn't feel like a joke. She was a single mother living on welfare in Edinburgh, writing in cafés because she couldn't afford to heat her flat, with a half-finished manuscript about a boy wizard. She sent it to publisher after publisher. Twelve of them turned her down. "Children's books about magic don't sell," one told her. "Too long," said another.

She kept going anyway. When Bloomsbury finally said yes, it came with a warning: get a day job, because nobody expected the book to make any real money. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone has since sold more than 500 million copies. Rowling didn't succeed because she was talented enough to skip the rejection. She succeeded, in large part, because of something psychological researchers have spent nearly two decades studying with real rigor, and something I've come to recognize in my own story too.

What Grit Actually Means

Psychologist Angela Duckworth's research, first published in 2007 and expanded across studies with West Point cadets, National Spelling Bee competitors, and teachers in high-poverty schools, found that a trait she called grit, defined as passion and sustained perseverance toward a long-term goal, predicted achievement more reliably than talent or IQ in every one of those groups. Talent matters. It just isn't the deciding factor most people assume it is. The deciding factor is whether you keep working toward the same goal long after the initial excitement wears off and the setbacks start piling up.

This is genuinely good news, because talent is mostly fixed and grit is not. Duckworth's own research has shown that grit can be built, largely through repeated experience with exactly the kind of setback that makes people want to quit.

Why "One More Try" Is Doing More Than It Looks Like

Every rejection letter Rowling received was, technically, evidence that the project might not work. What her response shows is the specific psychological move that grit research keeps finding in high performers: treating a setback as information about that attempt, not as a verdict on the goal itself.

Melanie Perkins, whose name you may know less well than Rowling's, lived a version of this same pattern for three straight years. Before Canva became one of the most valuable companies ever built by a woman, Perkins pitched it to more than 100 investors and heard no from every single one.

Many told her design software was a niche market nobody outside professional designers would ever want. Instead of treating each rejection as the final word, she revised her pitch deck after every meeting, refining the argument a little more each time, until the version that finally worked bore little resemblance to the one she'd started with. "If you get your foot in the door just a tiny bit," she's said, "you have to kind of wedge it all the way in." Canva launched in 2013. It's since been valued in the tens of billions of dollars.

Grit in Women Entrepreneurs: What This Looks Like in My Own Story

I want to tell you about a moment I don't usually talk about publicly, because I think it matters more than the polished version of any story.

When I was first conceptualizing my own lingerie brand, a friend recommended a business consultant who specialized in the intimate apparel industry. I went to see him after work, nervous to show him my early thinking and genuinely afraid of what he might say. The verdict I got that evening was blunt: "You have no chance of succeeding because of the enormous competition in that area of fashion."

I remember exactly how that sentence felt landing on me. It wasn't gentle, and it wasn't meant to be encouraging. But I started the brand anyway. Not because I ignored what he said, but because I let it be information about one person's view of the competitive landscape, rather than a verdict on whether I was capable of building something meaningful.

Looking back, that evening is one of the clearest examples in my own life of the exact thing the research describes: the setback didn't disappear, and neither did the fear. I just decided the fear didn't get the final vote.

For the next six years, until I made the decision to dissolve it, that brand, Ann Vogue, became one of the luxury lingerie labels sold in exclusive boutiques in New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Berlin. The consultant wasn't wrong that the competition was enormous. He was wrong that it meant I had no chance.

What This Means for You

If you're sitting with a rejection right now, a client who passed, an investor who declined, a consultant who told you there's no room for you, the research suggests the most useful question isn't whether you have what it takes. It's whether you're willing to treat this specific setback as information rather than a final answer, and keep going anyway.

In my experience as a life coach, this is often where real traction begins, not from waiting to feel undiscourageable, but from learning to separate what a single no actually means from what it feels like it means in the moment. Those are almost never the same thing.

You don't need every door to open. You need to keep approaching doors. Eventually, and often when you least expect it, one of them does.

Ready to Keep Going, Differently?

If you're in the middle of a setback that's testing your resolve, you don't have to figure out the next move alone. Book a Free 30-Minute Chat with Asi Efros to talk through what this specific "no" might actually be telling you 👉 Book your free 30-minute chat here

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