Jia Jiang
Most organisations underperform not because their people lack ideas, but because they will not ask for the meeting, the budget, the deal, or the promotion. Fear of rejection is the single most reliable brake on sales conversion, internal mobility, and innovation pipelines. Training rarely addresses it directly, because the skill being trained is emotional, not technical.
Jia Jiang teaches sales teams, founders, and employees to convert rejection into a usable asset, drawing on a documented experiment of 100 consecutive rejection attempts and the bestselling book it produced.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jia Jiang
- He has built one of the most-watched TED Talks on rejection, with audiences in the tens of millions, and translates the same material into structured corporate training rather than a one-off motivational set piece.
- His method is empirical, not theoretical. Every principle is anchored in a real, filmed encounter from his 100 Days of Rejection project, which gives sales and frontline audiences a concrete model they can copy.
- Wuju Learning runs structured workshops with measurable behaviours, particularly suited to commercial teams whose performance is gated by their willingness to ask.
- The 2019 Toastmasters Golden Gavel, awarded annually to a single keynote speaker, signals that his platform skill matches the substance, which matters when the audience is a full sales kick-off or a global all-hands.
Biography highlights
- Bestselling author of Rejection Proof (Penguin Random House, 2015).
- TED speaker; talk has surpassed 10 million views across platforms.
- Recipient of Toastmasters International’s 2019 Golden Gavel.
- Founder and CEO of Wuju Learning; owner of Rejection Therapy.
- Keynote audiences include Google, Dell Technologies, Johnson & Johnson, Visa, Allstate, LinkedIn, and Citi.
- BSc Computer Science, Brigham Young University; MBA, Duke University.
Biography
Fear of rejection is the most common operating tax on organisational performance, and the one least often named. It shows up as the unmade pitch, the unsent email, the deal that did not close because no one asked for the order. Jia Jiang built a body of work that confronts it as a trainable skill.
The work began in 2012 with a personal experiment. Jiang set out to be rejected once a day for 100 days, filmed each attempt, and published the encounters online. The series went viral. It became the basis of his TED Talk, which has since passed 10 million views across platforms, and the bestselling book Rejection Proof, published by Penguin Random House in 2015.
From that material he built Wuju Learning, a training business that turns the experiment into structured workshops for sales teams, founders, and frontline employees. Audiences include Google, Dell Technologies, Johnson & Johnson, Visa, Allstate, LinkedIn, and Citi. In 2019, Toastmasters International awarded him the Golden Gavel, given to one keynote speaker each year.
Jiang’s route to the work is part of its credibility. He came to the United States from Beijing at sixteen, took a computer science degree at Brigham Young University, an MBA at Duke, and was working as a marketing manager at Dell when an early start-up failed on a single investor rejection. The work that followed is built on that specific moment.
Key speaking topics
- Rejection as a learnable skill
- Resilience in sales and commercial teams
- Behavioural courage and asking
- Personal effectiveness and self-leadership
- Discipline and sustained performance
- Entrepreneurial resilience after failure
Ideal for
- Sales and revenue organisations running annual kick-offs or quota-reset events
- Founders, scale-up leaders, and start-up communities
- Learning and development functions building resilience or sales-skills curricula
- All-employee and frontline audiences where engagement and initiative are the underlying problem
Audience outcomes
- A concrete method for asking more often and recovering faster from a no
- A reframe of rejection as data about the request, not the requester
- Specific tactics drawn from filmed real-world encounters, not abstract principles
- A shared language and reference point that teams can use back at work the next day
Talks
The foundational keynote, drawn directly from the experiment and the bestselling book, that reframes rejection as a learnable skill for sales, leadership, and personal effectiveness.
Key takeaways:
- A repeatable method for converting a no into a yes through better asking
- The behavioural patterns that separate the people who keep asking from the people who quietly stop
- Practical exercises for sales teams to apply the same approach in pipeline conversations
A second keynote on sustainable discipline, arguing that long-term performance is built on attachment to the work itself rather than willpower.
Key takeaways:
- Why willpower and pain tolerance fail as long-term operating systems
- How to build daily systems that compound across sales, learning, and personal goals
- A practical model for sustaining effort on ambitious work over years, not weeks