Shark Tank’s Barbara Corcoran: Rejection – Entrepreneurship’s Big Kahuna

Individuals, whether they be business owners or employees, have endured rejection. While rejection is not always the end of the road, as many good things come from it, it does need to be handled in the right manner. In the video below Entrepreneur.com's deputy editor Teri Evans asks Barbara Corcoran, a real estate expert in the United States and a Shark on network ABC's reality show Shark Tank, how she handles rejection. Corcoran built the Corcoran Group, New York city's largest real estate company. – Stuart Lowman

How do you view rejection and how can you help other entrepreneurs view it in maybe, a different light?

Let me tell you. Rejection is the big kahuna in all entrepreneurship. Show me somebody who can take a hit and I'll show you a good entrepreneur. I don't know if I made that up, but I think I did. It's all in how well you get back up. By the way, do you know what I found? If you think about it, great salespeople make a couple of million Dollars per year, selling apartments in New York City, which my great salespeople do – all great entrepreneurs. All business comes from them. They manage their own business. They hire staff. They're entrepreneurs. Do you know what I found? The only difference between the superstars making millions per year and the persons barely getting by… It's not by contacts or how hard they work. Some people work just as hard and don't make any money. It's about how long they feel sorry for themselves once they're hit. Some people can take a hit and they're no good for two weeks.

They're at their desks. They look like they're working but they're not working. Mentally, they're not there. The great salespeople take the hit and then they jump right back up. They've been hurt just as much as the next guy has, but they work right through it and keep going. Let me tell you: if you have that skill, you should be an entrepreneur because you'll be paid well for it. The single best thing I do (more than anything else I can do in building businesses for myself and these other people) is that I fail well. I fall on my face. Nobody's better at pretending 'I'm not thinking of a quick cover-up and trying to keep moving'. In that act (itself) of getting back up fast, you always stumble onto something good. I'm not a religious person. I was raised so religiously that I don't ever want to think about it again. However, I do believe that once you put your mind to going forward on anything, there's almost a battle cry that goes out in the universe and the world rallies around you. It just comes to the fore, again and again.

To have that kind of 'good faith' that 'I'm just getting back up, even if I'm going to get slammed', life is fair in its own weird way in building businesses; you will be swept up by some lucky chance. It happened to me every time I got back up.