If you're going to build something from nothing, you've got to know what really works.

I took a thousand dollar loan and built a five billion dollar business, and now I make smart investments in new businesses on Shark Tank. This is Barbara

Corcoran and you're listening to Business Unusual presented by On Deck.

This week on Business Unusual I'm going to be answering all of the great questions you guys keep sending me in on business, life, how to move forward, how to jump over obstacles.

Come on, I'm good at it, and I want to share my advice. But first, think

you need to sit by the door waiting for opportunity to knock. You'll be sitting there forever

forget about it. Opportunity, I know, through vast experience,

can hide in even the worst situations

and finding it's a matter of believing it's really there.

I've found opportunities in the darkest times in my

career because I believed really in my heart that something good had to come and

that attitude was a start of getting the kind of vision that you could see it when it was coming.

Let me give you an example.

I was in the depths of a real estate recession

with my backup against the wall and owing a lot of money to banks

that I had no ability to repay.

I was desperate.

But I also had that optimism of knowing that when things are really, really bad, there's got

to be something in the pile of

badness that is a new opportunity. So what do you think happened? I finally had a

desperate idea to try to make some cash. So I took 88 apartments that nobody

wanted that was languishing the market and instead of asking individual

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