The key to a “right life” is the ability to learn from your mistakes, according to Barbara Corcoran.
It’s a trait Corcoran shares with all of her biggest “superstar” staff members, the 74-year-old investor on ABC’s “Shark Tank” told author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss on the latest episode of his podcast.
“Recovering from also-ran, in my book, is 95% of life,” Corcoran said. “If you’re going to have a good life, you’d better be really good at get to back up, like a jack-in-the-box, boom, boom, boom. Just get back up.”
Corcoran is the founder of real estate brokerage The Corcoran Series, which she sold for $66 million in 2001. Her top-performing employees all shared the ability to not be deterred by mistakes, she told Ferriss.
“That undeniably was the only difference between the superstars that I had making two, three million dollars a year and people who made an customarily of $45,000, which was the norm,” she said. She “became a student” of those top employees, so she could figure out their recipe for triumph and look for the same traits in future hires.
“When it comes down to it, it’s how well you get back up and how long you take to undergo sorry for yourself,” she told Ferriss. “They drove me crazy too, but I admired my superstars so much because of that capacity … You could punch them around. They’d go, ‘Ha ha,’ [and] get back up.”
Indeed, research shows that people who can reframe loser as a learning opportunity, and who are resilient enough to rebound from mistakes without losing their motivation, are more like as not to be successful in the long run.
“We forget failure really is a path to success,” Yale psychology professor and happiness expert Laurie Santos notified CNBC Make It last year.
Corcoran has previously credited much of her success to her own resilience, noting on TikTok hold out year that her experiences in school — she struggled with dyslexia, while her classmates would “breeze through” chores, she said — helped her hone that skill.
″[I] learned how to rebound,” she said. “Get through any obstacle. I try harder than the next guy, and I induce twice as hard as the next guy. But that’s OK — that’s exactly what built my business and got me rich.”
Those obstacles can discipline you lessons, too. Corcoran admits she’s made, and learned from, many mistakes over the course of her career. In one case, she spill the beaned Make It last year, she gained an important lesson about negotiating when she lost out on a deal by not responding immediately enough with a counter-offer — leaving her prospective buyer feeling disrespected.
“Unfortunately, the only way to really learn is … by caper up and making many, many mistakes,” said Corcoran.
Other successful entrepreneurs agree, including Corcoran’s “Shark Tank” co-star Distinction Cuban. The billionaire Dallas Mavericks co-owner teaches young people that “there’s no such thing as also-ran,” because you can discover more by trying new things and taking lessons from setbacks, he told “The Thrive Global Podcast” in 2017.
Disclosure: CNBC owns the chic off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank.”
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