Barbara Corcoran

BARBARA CORCORAN
Real Estate Mogul

When I was in grammar school and high school, I was clearly dyslexic. I never got anything more than a charity D. I’m not trying to knock that; I was appreciative. I went through school, of course, as an extremely quiet child, fearful that people would find out I was “stupid.” Amazingly, I got into a college; thank God it was the first year they opened.


I had a great creative writing teacher. She reminded me of Mary Tyler Moore — cool, young, hip, dressed well. She was like everything I hoped to one day be. One of the first assignments was to write one paragraph describing anything; of course I went home thinking, “What do I write”?


That night, I felt the usual panic of “I need to make something coherent.” It was raining out, and I saw the rain hitting the window. So I just wrote a paragraph.


The next week, I was sitting in my classroom with 30 or so classmates as my teacher stood up in front of us. “I want to read to you the most beautiful description I’ve ever read,” she said. I heard the first sentence, “A raindrop falls upon a window. At first, it stands still.” My friend, who didn’t know it was my work, turned to me and said, “We’re never gonna compete with that!” That was the day I realized I was – well, maybe not brilliant – but I had hope. As it usually happened, in my mandatory math class, I got a D. But in Creative Writing, I got an A.

Over the last twenty-five years, Barbara Corcoran has parlayed a $1,000 loan into a five-billion-dollar real estate business. She is the author of If You Don’t Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails, a business book that has become a national best seller. She has been proclaimed the New York City “Real Estate Queen.”

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