39 Barbara Corcoran quotes on failing your way to success
Barbara Corcoran, the founder of The Corcoran Group, investor on ABC’s Shark Tank, intuitive marketer and fierce businesswoman is, perhaps, best described as the “greatest” failure in real-estate – since her biggest asset seems to be her way of dealing with failure. Corcoran was even rejected from Shark Tank after being been told she was in, but the seasoned saleswoman and “great failure” simply dusted her self of, wrote the best e-mail she could muster and was subsequently invited back in to compete for the seat. And she got it.
There is an incredibly important lesson to be learned here, and it is that if you learn to never be beaten by failure, and learn to embrace it as a steppingstone, you will succeed. Simple as that. But of course, you also need a plan. What Barbara realized was that if you first alter the perception of reality – such as by planting visions in the newspapers – reality itself would soon follow. This notion, along with some dare-devilry combined with a knack of never failing in failure, became her winning formula for success.
These Barbara Corcoran quotes are the perfect companion for your journey of falling over, getting up again and realizing your goals.
“I first discovered the word ’failure’ in the classroom. I can distinctly remember being in class and not being able to read or write … When Sister Stella-Marie told me that if I didn’t learn to pay attention, I would always be stupid. That was the day that I first discovered that I had a label”
– Barbara Corcoran
“My idea of hell, to this day, is to be asked to read out loud”
– Barbara Corcoran
“All of my singular, phenomenal successes that helped me build my business, happened on the heels of failure. I did not choose it that way, but somehow it always worked that way”
– Barbara Corcoran
“When he left me, I really felt like nothing … on the way out the door, he said to me: ‘You will never succeed without me.’ And I felt in my heart, through every bone in my body that I would rather die than let him see me not succeed”
– Barbara Corcoran
“I have found that failure and innovation are kissing cousins: you get one, you work on one, you automatically get the other. I was able to make the Corcoran Group the innovator of my industry because we were so good at failure”
– Barbara Corcoran
“If you are in real estate, it’s a business of rejection. A lot of noes and very few yeses”
– Barbara Corcoran
“The only difference between the people that were hugely successful and those that were not, was they took less time feeling sorry for themselves. They almost had a lower IQ so that if you smack them and hit them down they pop back up and said ‘I’m so stupid, hit me again’”
– Barbara Corcoran
“I have learned to think of failure – after everything I have done in life – as a lucky charm. Like a little bright light. Because you know what? I have never had it where I have never seen that the flip-side of that is always the biggest opportunity”
– Barbara Corcoran
“I feel that my own personal ability to handle rejection is more largely responsible for every success I have had, than anything else I have done in business. And believe me, I have learnt a lot”
– Barbara Corcoran
“The one thing I do so well, is that I fail well”
– Barbara Corcoran
“As entrepreneurs there is never a boring day – you might hate certain days – but there is never a boring day building your own business, because you have that wonderful great privilege of being in charge of your own destiny”
– Barbara Corcoran
“I think very often when you look back, where you come from has a heck of a lot to do with where you wind up; whether you take it, accept it or fight it”
– Barbara Corcoran
“I had twenty-three jobs before I found real estate, and was fired from 3 of them. Thank God I was fired or else I might still be in those jobs”
– Barbara Corcoran
“People only count your successes”
– Barbara Corcoran
“This is a ‘people’ business, not a real estate business”
– Barbara Corcoran
“Perception creates reality”
– Barbara Corcoran
“In New York, the nice people got mowed over. I saw it myself the first week I moved in”
– Barbara Corcoran
“My mom said that ’the meek will inherit the earth’ – Do you know what I witnessed, right away? That the bigmouth, with less talent, inherited the earth”
– Barbara Corcoran
“I learned to really create the image of success, whether I had it or not”
– Barbara Corcoran
“[On the Corcoran Report] In peoples minds, we went from a nobody to a somebody in a day, in the life of New York City. I said: ‘Wow, I get it. I have a partner and it’s called The New York Times!’”
– Barbara Corcoran
“Certainly, I created the perception, and then reality followed”
– Barbara Corcoran
“Everybody wants what everybody wants, and nobody wants what nobody wants”
– Barbara Corcoran
“Expand before you are ready”
– Barbara Corcoran
“I found that there is never really a good time to expand, but I always expanded. I was able to leap-frog over my competitors because I was super aggressive in expanding before I was ready, and I trusted that somehow it would all work out – and it always did work out, because you have a gun to your own head and you have to run like crazy to catch up to yourself”
– Barbara Corcoran
“It took a little courage or stupidity on the front side, but without it I could have never grown and become the number one firm in New York”
– Barbara Corcoran
“There are only two kinds of people: expanders and containers”
– Barbara Corcoran
“Ignore the resume, just focus on the person and file them: Are they an expander or a container? People always do well if they do it naturally well”
– Barbara Corcoran
“I fire the bottom 25 % of my salespeople every 6 months. Religiously”
– Barbara Corcoran
“Let me tell you what is great about this system. You cannot spend and grow a business, and have expansion growth … and carry the dead weight of the bottom 25 %. If you create a system, everyone knows the rules. Everyone knows it’s there”
– Barbara Corcoran
“Salespeople are either good from the beginning or they are not”
– Barbara Corcoran
“Get a complainer in the sales area and it’s the equivalent of introducing cancer to a healthy group of people”
– Barbara Corcoran
“Dump a complainer out of a sales group; the sales go up. Never saw an exception to that rule”
– Barbara Corcoran
“Fun is good for business”
– Barbara Corcoran
“The most underestimated tool used in business is the fun-card, in my opinion”
– Barbara Corcoran
“Everybody wanted to be at our parties, because they were bizarre!”
– Barbara Corcoran
“Bad times are the best times to move ahead”
– Barbara Corcoran
“Unless you are the top dog, the best time to move ahead is when things are bad. Because you can be assured that the top competitors, the big guys in your market place do agree with the common wisdom that ‘when things are bad it’s wise to lay low’”
– Barbara Corcoran
“When times are bad, the universe is open to totally different things”
– Barbara Corcoran
“If I had walked through a door, thinking that I had to have the answer when I got to the other side, I would not have done it. You know what I have found, working with people all my life? That people are so much smarter than they think they are and give themselves credit for – but they are only that way under pressure”
– Barbara Corcoran