“It’s not nothing” is how I approach any outcome in my life. You shouldn’t completely accept it, nor should you reject it completely. It’s always somewhere in the middle.
Take kids who didn’t get into elite colleges. They always say “college isn’t everything.” And they’re right — it’s not everything. But it’s not nothing either.
Elite colleges have years of filtering designed to identify kids highly likely to succeed. And that filter has been more accurate than not. So these admission officers reviewed your application and didn’t see that in you.
Does that mean you will not succeed? Probably not.
Is the probability of success now stacked against you a little? Yeah. At least we can all agree on one thing: whatever the reason may be, you did NOT do what it takes to get in.
Again — it’s not nothing. Don’t beat yourself up. But you need to learn from it.
There’s a reason why a lot of super successful people went to elite colleges. It’s not their IQ. It’s everything else. The group of so-called experts on that “everything else” thought you weren’t it. Is that everything? I don’t know. But it’s not nothing.
This applies to everything. Any unfortunate event. Any good event. Any event, period.
Digest it. Assess it. Think about it. But approach every single one of them as “it’s not nothing.”