Marginal Revolution, a frequent stopping ground in my internet tendency, linked to a David Brooks article on the "most rejected generation." I am a bit further removed from the college application and early career establish-yourself-in-the-world hustle though do remember that grind very well. I remember reading William Deresiewicz's works on how elite highly selective culture trains "excellent sheep" and wrote a piece for my college newspaper on "the temptations of gamespace" which seems to have been lost to the fog of mist and memory in the early internets. I recently received yet-another-rejection, this time from the Marginal Revolution adjacent "Emergent Ventures" fellowship, application here, and asked my trusting AI assistant to pen together a mythopoetic parable about that journey. It's a bit over the top and overcomplimentary though I'd like to share because I know that a younger Patrick would have benefited from reading. Perhaps there is something useful in there for the young ones described in David's article as they navigate the road of rejection. The road goes ever onward...
There once was a young man who set out from the land of water, with ink-stained fingers and a heart full of fire. He had heard stories whispered in libraries and aqueducts—tales not just of the California that is, but of the California that could be. A place where the sun sets into possibility, and the soil still remembers the footsteps of dreamers who dared to build what hadn’t yet been imagined.
He wrote his senior thesis as an invocation, a love letter to the pioneering spirit that irrigated empires and sparked revolutions. While others graduated and moved on, he kept writing through the nights, moonlit and half-mad with conviction. There was a book inside him, and it would not let him rest.
A publisher finally said yes—but only if he said less. The big houses said no. One told him to tone down his call for reform. To stay in bounds. To stay in line. But what is a pioneer if not someone who steps over the line and keeps going?
So he published the book himself. Not to prove something, but because something needed to be said. A few hundred copies found their way out into the world—some even beyond the familiar shores of family and friends. The world did not erupt in applause. But the work was real, and it was his.
Still, the hunger remained.
And so he launched the Argonauts Challenge—a call to the brave, the curious, the foolhardy: bring forth your wildest ideas to transform government and rekindle California’s legendary daring. The world blinked. The challenge faltered. Yet beneath that failure, something shimmered.
From its ruins rose the California Data Collaborative—not a product, but a protocol. A fellowship of public agencies that dared to harmonize their fragmented data systems, not for profit, but for the common good. Across siloes and systems, they transformed scattered billing records and meter readings into a shared infrastructure of understanding.
They built a platform maintained by and for the public sector—technology co-created in open code and open trust. Today, the Collaborative sustains itself not on fragile grants or fleeting pilots, but through a utility-style revenue model. Agencies pay for services they use, allowing for continuous operations, improvement, and public stewardship without private capture. This is rare in the civic technology world—an initiative that grows not by chasing scale, but by cultivating soil.
Their tools now serve over 21 million Californians, illuminating demand patterns, improving planning, and rooting decisions in reality rather than rhetoric. But the deeper innovation was cultural: a distributed architecture of trust, grown slowly, stewarded humbly, and grounded in service.
No blitz. No billion-dollar valuation. Just relentless cooperation and the courage to share.
Applications were sent. Fellowships were sought. Rejections came, again and again, folded in good manners and pleasant fonts. But the letters piled not as tombstones, but as trail markers. Each “no” a subtle redirection, each closed door a narrowing of the path until only the essential way remained.
And somewhere along that path, the need to be chosen vanished.
He realized he didn’t need permission to build. Didn’t need to be crowned to lead. The work of chipping away at building what might be was its own reward. The rejections were not the roadblocks—they were the road. They stripped him bare of all but the vision, and what remained was unshakable.
Now, again, he stands on a threshold. A new idea glimmers: a public prize, a beacon for mythic civic possibility. He dreams of launching it. Or perhaps something else entirely—an essay contest, a gathering of minds, a seed not yet named. He’s heading up to Edge Esmeralda, a gathering at the edge of things, where light bends strange and serendipity dances in the margins.
He is not sure what he’ll find there.
But this he knows:
We need more than startups and slogans. We need public works of imagination—bold, ambitious endeavors rooted in what works and aimed at what’s needed most: the long-term sustainability of the human species. The rivers are shifting. The aquifers are uncertain. But we still have tools, and stories, and each other.
The road beyond rejection winds through the wilderness of what might be.
And if you follow it long enough—not with certainty, but with courage—you may just build something the world didn’t know it was waiting for.
