After a sort of down-hearted post, I thought I’d put something together that was a bit more upbeat. Having started working just over a month ago, I am now a bonafide commuter and take the tube daily. As I’m sure we all have, I’ve seen my fair share of amusing sights on my travels. However, two things have stood out for me:

1. Women doing their make-up ON THE TUBE. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I’m not holding onto something when on the tube, I find it pretty hard to stand perfectly still while the tube is jumping and bumping about. However, some women seem to see this journey as a perfect time to try to put on their make-up in the morning. I’ve not seen this go well for a single one of them. One smartly dressed woman thought it would be a good idea to put her mascara on whilst on the Waterloo & City line. Every time she put it close to her eye, the tube would jolt and she’d come within a centimetre of stabbing herself in the eye. Nevertheless, she would regroup, take a breath, and try again a few seconds later. Without success again I’m afraid to say. I think she got off the tube without touching her eyelashes once. Whilst this did make my tube journey a little more enjoyable, I thought this was simply a one off…until a few days later on the Central line. You guessed it, sitting down was another woman using the least stable part of her day to try to carry out what I can only imagine to be a very delicate job.  This lady was trying to do her lipstick. She fared better than the lady from the Waterloo & City line as she actually managed to complete the task but I still felt I was watching a crazy challenge of some sort. She came perilously close to putting a line of lipstick across her face on a number of occasions but just about managed to get away with it. Not only this, but these women don’t even wait until they’re stopped at a station for 30 seconds. I don’t know what quite motivates them or started this trend, but seeing people trying to do their make-up on the tube is something that has absolutely baffled me. If you’re a woman who does her make-up on the tube and you happen to find yourself reading this, please leave a comment explaining the rationale behind it because regardless how hard I try, I really can’t believe there isn’t a more practical place for it to be done for 5 minutes before work.

2. The second thing that I’ve found baffling about the tube is how people seem to get angry, or uncomfortable, if you read over their shoulder. I know you do it, so don’t look down on me for it. And I’ll apologise, but if you’re reading the Evening Standard on the tube and I’m stood next to you, or behind you, I’m going to read it too. I’m not going to lean over your shoulder or complain when you turn the page, but I’m going to have a little look at what’s going on. EVERYONE DOES IT. You’d think people would be fine with it, but a few times people have tried to hold the newspaper in a different way to prevent others from reading it. If they’d paid for it I may have a tiny (and I mean tiny) bit of sympathy for them, but they’re reading a free newspaper, in a crowded carriage, and seem to wish for absolute privacy whilst they do. If you’re reading a text then I think it’s a different story and I think there’s room for some discomfort in that case, but if you’re reading a newspaper, book, or anything that’s publicly available, I think you just have to accept other people are going to read it too. They don’t mean any harm, they’re just bored like you. So next time it happens, don’t make it too hard for them OK? And if it really is private, I’d suggest you wait until you’re off the tube before you read it. Rule of thumb: If you wouldn’t read it aloud on the tube, don’t read it at all.

Before I begin, I think it’s worth saying that this post isn’t meant to be depressing, it’s simply the culmination of a few things I’ve been thinking about in the last few days.

I recently started following L.A Reid on Twitter. L.A Reid is a music executive and producer who recently became a judge on the American version of the X Factor. L.A tends to tweet things that will motivate people to be the best that they can. And I love that, I think it’s a great message to be sending in some very difficult times right now. However, he recently tweeted something that I just could not have disagreed with more. It was this:

“The only thing that will stop you from fulfilling your dreams is you.”

He tweeted this on the 25th of November. This was pretty coincidental for me as it was also the day that I got rejected from Oxford University for the second time. Once again, without an interview. So, as you could imagine, when I had just heard this news, this wasn’t the first thing I wanted to see at the top of my twitter feed. I understand the overall message here. But sometimes in life, other people do stop you from fulfilling your dreams. They may not do it with malice but, nevertheless, they stop you from fulfilling your dreams.

Rejection hurts. Whether it be your dream job, or for me my dream university, I’m sure we’ll all feel that horrible feeling of being told you’re not good enough at some point in our lives. People can immediately tell you how good you are, how nice you are, how it’s just a setback and you can come back from it but, weirdly, the one thing telling you you’re not good enough overpowers all these things and really hits home. A lot of people who get rejected receive a generic sort of “unlucky” letter or even e-mail. They seem to rarely tell you why you didn’t get the job or make the grade, and they don’t seem to tell you what to work on. They just seem to use phrases like “after much deliberation” and “due to extremely high competition.” These phrases may be meant to make you feel better, but I’d actually like to be told that I fell down on X, Y and Z and should work on that. I think if you’re going to have that horrible feeling of being told you’re not good enough, you should in the same breath be given a target to aim at.

As an aside, I recently found out that some employers don’t even bother to reply to certain people who send in C.Vs or applications. A friend of mine who is applying to university rang one of his choices, which will remain nameless, only to be told that they “were too busy” to speak to him, and that he should e-mail. It’s been 2 weeks and they haven’t replied. I can’t help but find that absolutely disgusting. If you are reading this and are in the position of being the person who makes decisions of this sort. Remember every single person who applies to you is a real person, and isn’t just the form you have on your table. You should have the simple decency to acknowledge them and give them the time they deserve. After all, they’ve made time to research about you, and have tried to put something together to impress you. So, for me, to simply not even respond to this, or to say you’re too busy for this, is utterly reprehensible. I strayed a little bit there from the focus of this post, but I was really angered by this and had to say something about it.

Back to business. After reading L.A Reid’s tweet, I wanted to find something else to make me feel a bit better about myself. Nothing came to me all day. When I got home, I walked into my room and saw a picture frame I had been bought. Inside this picture frame are the words:

“Sometimes on the way to the dream you get lost and find a better one.”

I actually found this quite amusing as I felt it was as if someone had just put a counter argument to Mr Reid. It really appealed to me as it says everything that needs to be said when you’ve just been rejected or missed out on something. The horrible, but also amazing, fact is that life will just keep on going regardless what happens to you. As much as you might not want them to, the clocks will carry on ticking and the news will still be on every night at 10pm on BBC 1. So it’s what you do with yourself in the aftermath that counts. This in itself is an age old adage, but it’s true. I’m not saying you should immediately move on from whatever it is as I actually don’t think you should. Sometimes it’s good to sit there and be angry about it, and to go over it in your mind and try to figure out what’s wrong. Even if you can’t work out why, I would argue it’s still a good thing to think over it for a little while. But providing you pick yourself up a few days, or even weeks, later I’m pretty confident you’ll get lost and find yourself a better dream to chase.

Those of you who have been paying attention to this so far may have taken note that I said this was the second time I had been rejected from Oxford. I was indeed rejected last year too. So I’ve been through this all before, and in another form, I’ll go through it again. But in the year since I got rejected, I decided to take a gap year and to apply for a job at one of the world’s biggest companies. It has offices in countries over the world and is renowned for achieving results. They did give me an interview. In the few weeks following the interview, they decided that it would be a good idea to take me on for a few months, and maybe longer, in my gap year. I was for them, as my manager told me, a gamble as I was the first gap year student the firm had ever taken. So, in getting rejected from Oxford the first time round, I managed to become the youngest employee (ever I think) in one of the world’s biggest companies.

Of course at the time you don’t know something like this will happen, and it doesn’t make you feel any better when you are rejected from something else. As I’ve found again this weekend. But this time, for me, it’s slightly different, as of course I’m down about not getting to go somewhere I really wanted to go to study, but I’m excited to see what the future holds and what the next dream is I’ll find to chase.

So I do think L.A Reid was wrong in his tweet. Sometimes other people can stop you from fulfilling your dreams, and when they do it hurts like hell. But only you can stop yourself from picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and running at the next wall.

As the great Steve Jobs once said, it’s only when you look back that you can connect the dots. Those words could not be more true. So carry on living life, be the best that you can, and enjoy looking back on every rejection you get and seeing what you achieved as a result.