My PhD students write and submit research papers based on the work that they conduct. These papers are not always accepted in the first round and sometimes need a few tries before the paper at hand is accepted. The challenge is that the acceptance or rejection of a paper is often interpreted as the paper being a good or bad paper. I disagree with that framing as you associate the outcome you don’t control with the action that you took. Buying a lottery ticket and winning the lottery is a bad decision anyway as buying lottery tickets is simply a losers game. So, even if the outcome was good, the decision was not. Similarly, you can take all the right decisions and still not end up with the outcome that you hoped for. So, rather than focusing on the outcome that you can’t control, focus on the actions that you put into a situation as those you can control.