Barbara Corcoran's 10 lessons for reinventing yourself

More Magazine's third annual Reinvention Convention took place Monday in New York City featuring a star-packed line-up of women speakers.

New York real estate legend Barbara Corcoran, speaking to a packed house, shared her 10 hard-earned lessons of what it took to go from a real-estate mogul to a fixture on television.

Recounting her salad days working as a waitress in Edgewater, N.Y., Corcoran kept her audience in stitches recounting how she put her busty co-worker to shame by wearing big red ribbons in her pigtails. The story is always an audience favorite, and in fact gave her the title of her bestselling inspirational memoir, "If You Don't Have Big Breasts Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails and Other Lessons I Learned from My Mom."

Corcoran, who sold her brokerage firm for $70 million the Friday before 9/11 -- (the conglomerate who bought it tried for a month to go back on the deal) -- walked away with $66 million in cash. Everyone expected her to sail off happily into the sunset.

Instead, depression swooped in, caused by the isolation of losing a meaningful job.