I am twenty-two years old today and I’m currently squashed into a tiny airline seat next to a cuddling couple beside me. While they’re whispering sweet nothings, I’m gracefully chomping down on a salami ciabatta, quality eats I purchased for $10 at the only airport café open at 6am.

I spent the first two hours of my birthday working on our Travelstrings marketing campaign and the third hour debating (as only girls can do) which of the thirty outfits I brought home I actually wanted to stuff into my suitcase for New York. Hours four and five were my mostly successful attempts to get some semblance of nighttime sleep. At hour six, I woke up, showered, and headed to the airport. Now it’s hour twelve, and I have a new theory.

Never fly on your birthday. And if you do, make use of the time differences to extend those few hours of birthday bash-ity. I technically made the wrong decision – I’m off to New York, where simply by stepping off of the plane, I will have lost 3 precious hours of birthday fun. Oops.

Well, let’s add some exceptions. Never fly on your birthday unless it’s the only option you have to see your parents and your best friend on the same day. Never fly on your birthday unless your fledgling startup is poised to launch and you wanted to stay in-office for as long as possible. Never fly on your birthday unless – heck, this rule has so many exceptions it’s practically disproven. So what’s the point?

There are points in every entrepreneur’s life where he or she must choose. Beach adventure or marketing strategy? Bar-hopping with friends or product team meetings? Work or sleep? For each person and situation the answer is different, and no matter what anyone says there isn’t one right choice.

Right now, I’m headed to watch my best friend Ellen graduate from NYU. Specifically, my choice this past week was: should I fly to New York on Saturday as scheduled to spend two more awesome days with Ellen? Conversely, should I cough up extra dough to Jetblue, delay my flight until Tuesday, and get more work done at home with my team? For better or worse, I chose the latter option, and thus my bank account is sporting an additional withdrawal and I’m typing this crammed into a window seat.

But while I am a self-identified workaholic, I am lucky to recognize those rare moments in life that I would not miss for anything. Ellen graduating from college is one of those moments. I admire and love this girl more than anything. It’s the type of love that persists even when we storm away from each other at the Chicago Institute of Art, even when we disagree about who pursued consulting first, or when she criticizes my great sense of style. I treasure the friendship we have built over the last seven years of life, and nothing (not even a venture capitalist calling right now for a meeting) would stop me from attending this important moment in her life.

Sure, I had to delay my flight for two days, fly on my birthday, work on the plane, and so forth – but none of that matters in the larger scheme of life. I just feel so fortunate to be flying towards love, the type of love that persists through starting companies or joining international consulting firms.

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It’s been over twelve hours since I started this post, and my 22nd birthday has come to an end. On the other side of the coast, as I was on my way to Manhattan and eating delicious Marea, my Travelstrings team worked tirelessly to launch our first Facebook campaign. We’ll pulled in over 140 new likes in the span of one day, thanks in large part to friends from all over offering their support. Over seventy people commented on the campaign I’ve worked on for the past week. Absolutely incredible, the best birthday present ever.

More than that, I feel so blessed to have a great team behind me, one that understands the intricacies of best friendship and can’t miss events. I feel so grateful to have a best friend that declared she would run to Pret a Manger for take-out breakfast while I finished up a few tasks. I am so frickin’ lucky and grateful and I can’t say it enough.

Thank you everyone for providing me with this simple joy.

Best, Melanie

When I was younger, I wanted to be many things – an elementary school teacher, the U.S. president, a constitutional lawyer. I don’t want any of those things anymore. Students are rowdy, bureaucracy is slow, and law is not my cup of tea. Instead, I am fascinated by the way businesses operate.

Sure, finance has a rather bad reputation after the mortgage crisis and near-collapse of the economy post-2008, and I’d rather not talk about all the sketchy things that banks have done since to recover lost profits. But the minute details of what makes a company run – how customers are targeted, pitched and sold, how employees are recruited and encouraged, how money is won from investors – that is incredibly interesting to me.

I recently graduated with an economics degree from UCLA, and let me tell you, the real learning happened far from Bunche or Public Affairs. No amount of taking first-order conditions would really tell me why customers wait in lines for days to buy the newest iThings or bolted from Netflix the moment Reed Hastings announced Flixster.

No, the learning occurred everywhere else, from the business fraternity that first taught me about investment banking and consulting to the private equity firm where I spent many late nights running intricate financial models. I learned how to value companies by making assumptions and building projections, why defense and consumer products companies are better investments than tech companies, and why one should never ever in their right mind invest in service providers. Finance (pronounced with an accent on the “nance”, nose up) was exciting and new.

By the time I headed to London during my third year, I thought that I was destined to become an investment banker working 100+ hours a week selling companies to private equity firms like mine. I didn’t know any better.

But London was a game-changer. Suddenly, there were no club meetings to attend, no internships to worry about, and no intensely competitive classes to stress over. Instead, after fun classes debating Shakespeare, I could nap in Regent’s Park, munch on lamb sandwiches at Bourough Market, or wander through the streets of London, gloriously lost. Whatever I wanted to do in the moment was a few Tube stations away. There was no way I could envision heading to investment banking after experiencing the joy of London freedom.

Instead, I returned home in time to recruit for consulting (naturally the better choice, with travel options and a problem-solving culture). Got an internship, and spent the summer solving a multi-billion dollar company’s analytical problems. It was what I expected – challenging, creative work within a supportive team environment – and more. Other consultants took the time to teach me about healthcare, green tech, mobile payments, and credit card authentication. I learned to run on three cups of coffee per day and to use my corporate credit card sparingly. I learned the way to talk professionally and to present myself, and each day, my team cheered me on. It was a fantastic experience, and one I encourage all business-minded people to try.

And yet here I am today. I’m two days away from my twenty-second birthday, writing this post at 3am in the morning knowing that my alarm clock will be ringing in just a few hours. Why am I writing? All I know is that I’ve been struck with this feeling of gratitude and reflection, and I wanted to capture it before sleep washes it all away.

For here I am, almost 22 years old, pursuing a dream with every ounce of passion I have in me. I haven’t slept much in months, I’ve turned my room into an office, and yet I feel so incredibly blessed to be where I am today. Starting a company is tough work, they tell me, and it certainly is. Skipping Saturday beach days to slog through emails and debate strategy is hard. Going weeks without seeing many of my friends is hard. But at the end of the day, nothing could be more worth it.

This company of ours has been built with so much love and passion and late-night ramen meals. My co-founders and I have studied computer science, business law, accounting, and marketing. We’ve attended at least 30 speeches, events and conferences that have taught us, in many ways, how others have succeeded as entrepreneurs.

Travelstrings is a product of many hands, mentors and shapers, and I have been lucky enough to see it grow. And grow it has! From an idea to a product, from a two-person team to a team that is big enough to field a side in Ultimate Frisbee (7 to be exact), we have moved quickly and slowly all at once. Some days I have no clue what I’m doing and some days, I can see clearly the strategy I’m building. It’s an incredible thing, building something from nothing, and I’ve been so lucky to watch and be a part of it all happening.

So I just want to say this one thing to remind myself a few weeks or months down the line: All of these sacrifices have been worth it. Having the opportunity to chase a dream, and to see it slowly becoming reality, is something to cherish and give thanks for. Melanie – no matter what happens in the future, this journey has been an amazing ride and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.