I’ve always believed in exploring opportunities at every turn. As Seneca once said, “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.” But at the same time, if I see opportunity and I’m not quite prepared, I go for it anyway. This results in plenty of demotivating failures. But as I’ve said before, you must fail to succeed. In the past few months…

I’ve failed at becoming commencement speaker.
I’ve failed at becoming recognition ceremony speaker.
I’ve failed at being hired at Google and numerous other companies.
I’ve failed to win multiple scholarships I applied for.

But for all of the opportunities that didn’t pan out, there were also some major wins. One of these wins is WiseResume.com, which started because I chose to take an entrepreneurship class last semester, even though I was swamped with work and had no good ideas to contribute to the class.

Eight months later, not only did my business idea for a community-based resume critique website win the business plan competition that went along with the class (which also secured us seed funding), but we’ve been able to find a very skilled web developer and have finally reached the stage where we can launch our idea to the world. We just launched WiseResume.com today, and I encourage you to check it out if you’re a student or young professional that would be interested in having a community of other students and professionals help you with your resume.

This big win in my life didn’t come easy though. For example, three of our team members, who were all brilliant and had unique skills, had to leave us because their graduation plans weren’t in line with continuing the WiseResume project. The loss of their strengths has made continuing forward all the more challenging.  But we never quit.

So this post is half of an inspirational message and half of a request for you to check out something I’ve been working very hard on for eight months. If I’ve inspired you, great. If you check out WiseResume.com and find it to be valuable, also great. If both occur, even better! All in all, jump on opportunities whenever they arise (even if there is some risk involved), learn to ignore the failures you experience, and focus heavily on the big wins in life. Happy opportunity hunting!