As a longtime startup investor and judge for ABC’s “Shark Tank,” Barbara Corcoran was a huge success in the end, measuring a lot of practice to see which one struggles.
Specifically, Corcoran likes to see what entrepreneurs do when something goes wrong with their business, she told journalist Katie Couric’s “Wake Up Call at Work” newsletter.
“I will be very careful about who will take responsibility and who will take responsibility,” Kolcoran said. “Six months after the ‘shark tank’, something’s always going wrong. The supplier did not deliver, the mold was wrong and the employees were ruined.
According to Corcoran, entrepreneurs are usually legally and financially responsible. Therefore, it is important to deal with missteps head on, and then learn from them, she told author and entrepreneur Tim Ferris on a March 2024 episode of his podcast.
“In my book, recovery from failure is 95% of my life,” Corcoran told Ferris. “If you’re going to live a good life, you’ll be really good at standing up right away, Jack in the boom, boom, boom, boom. Just get back on top.”
All Corcoran’s best and highest revenue employees share this trait, she added. These employees are resilient enough to bounce back from failure immediately. This also helps to give them confidence to look for new opportunities rather than avoid them from the fear of inevitable mistakes.
“After all, it’s just how well you come back and how long it takes you to feel sorry for yourself,” Corcoran added.
According to bestselling authors and communication experts Kathy and Ross Petras, blaming others when a mistake is made or when a disability occurs is a sure sign that someone has no emotional intelligence.
“Emotionally immature people often don’t take responsibility for their actions when something goes wrong,” the author wrote for CNBC.
Instead of seeking a scapegoat when something gets unhappy, taking ownership and not looking defensively, CEO and Harvard-trained career expert Susie Welch told CNBC in 2019 that he told CNBC: Make. You can then quickly rebound and avoid the same misstep twice.
“Everyone gets messed up at times,” Welch said. “But unless you let it do that, it’s not the end of the game for you.”
Disclosure: CNBC owns exclusive network cable rights to “Shark Tank.”
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