If there's one thing I learned in this web 2.0 world, it's "fail fast". If there's one thing I learned from my asian parents, it's "failure is not an option". I hated my parents for this growing up, but I've come to appreciate it.

When you go into something knowing that there's no option to fail, you hustle in ways that the less paranoid never would. The impact of this is incredible, and I think that a good way to increase your chances of succeeding is to find ways to make it so that failure is as far from an option as possible.

This means burning all of your ships: leaving school, quitting your job, and telling everyone you know that you're working on a startup. Since taking grant and investment money from numerous people, I've felt a personal pressure to push forward that I hadn't before. I'm obliged not to fail, and my productivity is noticeably stronger now.

A few things that I don't approve of:

1) People who do "consulting on the side". These almost always fail, because the entrepreneur isn't in a sink-or-swim mentality. They justify it by citing how much money they make through such little work, and that's all true. But no matter what, at the end of the day, the entrepreneur is giving him or herself the permission to screw up the company and go back to the financial security that freelance consulting provides. I say they burn their ships and focus on what they actually care about.

2) Doing school while building a company. It doesn't work at all. I tried it back in middle school, I tried it in high school, and I tried it as a junior and senior at Berkeley. Even if you say that you don't care about your grades, it doesn't matter, because you're inevitably going to lose productivity and give yourself more permission to fail. As Paul Graham says in one of his essays that student entrepreneurs can always go back to school and discount their failure as a side project that didn't go anywhere. And that's why it makes me cringe when I hear my classmates applying to grad school or jobs so that they have a "backup option". Which brings me to the worst offender:

3) Keeping your job, making business a "side-thing". This implies that you won't quit the security of your job until there's traction or investment funding, yet you're not going to find either unless you're working day and night on your startup. It's a catch-22, and something has to give. I remember meeting people last year who said they were working on a startup, yet keeping their jobs in the meanwhile. They said that they were "considering leaving their job", which meant that they were too scared to do so. A year later, they're still in the same job, and their startup didn't go anywhere.

The main critique to burning one's ships is that you're incurring huge risk by doing so. If you don't have any backup options, what happens if and when your company fails? If I had to answer, I'd say that it won't come to that, because you forfeited all permission to fail by leaving your backup options on the table. But realistically speaking, it's not that bad. You're a great engineer working on your new startup, but Google's trying to recruit you to work there. Tell them to go away, and they'll probably be back in the event that your company fails.

Now proactive things you can do to decrease your permission to fail: - Telling everyone you know about your company. Every time you see friends, they'll ask you "how's your company doing?" And you're going to want to have good things to say. - Join an early stage accelerator program like YCombinator or TechStars. I think this is critical, because you feel an immense amount of pressure to stay on top of all of your peers. You want to save yourself the embarrassment of having a crappy product to show for, and you don't want to let down your earliest backers. Because they're counting on you.

To sum this all up, it comes down to one thing: psychology. There's an incredible psychological impact of knowing that you can't fail, and it's artificially tapping into your evolutionary instincts. If you perceive that you're about to get killed, you're going to work that much harder to stay alive.

A few months ago, I wrote an article on how to come up with business ideas. I basically said to look at the world with a critical eye, and to keep track of everything that seems to suck. I still maintain that philosophy, and I recently discovered something about my "passions" in life: Everything I aspire to do is directly related to something that I dislike. I hate education, and I always have. School has never been a fun place for me. In elementary school, I was bored out of my mind. My 5th grade teacher discouraged me from my entrepreneurial pursuits. High school was more about dealing with girl drama than it was about learning meaningful things. By having spent more than 80% of my life suffering through these traumatic experiences, I've become interested in something that I've forever dreaded. While I'm yet to do anything super innovative to help the world of education, my past project internshipIN.com was a start in that direction. I realized that most of my learning came from working at a company, and so I spent my limited free time on helping students find real world internships. More recently, I decided that I hated accounting, I hated finance, and I hated money (although I enjoy the idea of having it). Managing finances is the one thing I despise most in building a company, and nothing stresses me out more than thinking about money. It's the root of all evil, it causes people to kill, it leads to people going to jail (think Madoff), and yet it's the biggest driving force behind every person's life aspirations. So I built a startup, Indinero.com, around the idea of making money suck less for businesses. It's something I plan on dedicating my career to. One of my friends in the investment world recently asked me why I'm building Indinero. After all, why would any young college student want to work on a finance startup? I think about my life as doing two primary things: Minimizing my risk, and minimizing my dissatisfaction with the world. This is an odd way to think about things, because most people think about their life in the opposite way. But I've come to realize that minus the shitty things that happen in life, I'm an optimally happy person. If I can remove the things that crush my soul, I'd be a happier person, and the world would theoretically be a better place. What would you rather do: Make the world a better place, or prevent it from sucking as bad as it does? I'd pick the latter, because it embraces the fact that the world is far from its optimal state. As my friend Manu told me, "make sure you're creating a painkiller instead of a vitamin." As I write this article, I'm suffering from the worst cold I've had in years. I'd pay anything to make this go away, and no cold medication has worked. So thinking about life from my current unhappy perspective, I see the world as a crappy place to live, and I'd be 10X happier if I simply wasn't unhappy. What a seemingly simple idea! Because think about it: during the happiest moments of your life, you probably didn't have anything special or unique that made you happy. But in each and every one of these happiest moments, you lacked the things that would otherwise drive you mad. This past summer was the happiest time of my life. I lived on ramen (literally), I shared a tiny Berkeley home with my team members at Indinero, and I was at the peak of my happiness despite my having zero material assets and close to zero fulfillment in my career. But I didn't have the two things that stress me out most: 1) school and 2) money issues. Between being on summer break and having $35k in the bank (and a startup that creates software that helped cure my finance concerns), I couldn't be happier. Or in more meaningful terms, I couldn't be happier with my life. I'm going to suggest the inverse of what Tony Hsieh from Zappos.com preaches. He's big on figuring out what makes you happy, and it was inspiring for me to see. But being honest with myself, I felt that it wasn't very satisfying because it just seemed too idealistic for even my liking. If you gave someone a week to think about what makes them happy, they still won't be able to give you the correct answer. People are generally bad at thinking of what makes them happy, so instead of focusing on happiness, I think it's much more practical to focus on unhappiness because it's much easier for us to identify and eliminate. Identifying sources of unhappiness is the easy part. Eliminating them is the difficult part. but it's what makes life seem more interesting. I think entrepreneurs are so fascinating because they first eliminate that point of dissatisfaction in their own life, then dedicate their remaining time to helping others eliminate it too. My mom is a prime example: growing up in a poor family, she had no choice but to wear her older brother's hand-me-downs. There's nothing more depressing than a teenage girl wearing her older brother's ugly clothing. So as a 13 year old, my mom designed and sewed her own clothing. Soon later, she started doing this for others. Fast forward a few decades, and it's the driving force behind her career and the jobs of hundreds of people. As pessimistic as it sounds, I think that identifying your sources of unhappiness is the most effective and honest way for you to live a better life. (and find ideas for your next company) What do you hate? How can you turn it into helping yourself and ultimately helping others? And that's the key to happiness.

Since childhood, I've associated computer science with geeky and socially inept little boys, and for rational reason: because all of the computer geeks I knew were in fact geeky and socially inept little boys! But as I mentioned in my previous post about computer camp, I've wanted to go into tech from an early age -- before the idea of entrepreneurship ever occurred to me. However, as I became less socially inept, I began associating myself with the non-geeks. The jocks! The cheerleaders!

People often ask me if I feel as if I'm being taken advantaged of, or if being a girl makes things more difficult. No and yes -- I don't feel as if guys are mean to girls in computer science. If anything, guys are more willing to help a cute girl debug her code for obvious reason. But is it more difficult? From a social standpoint, definitely. Most girls in tech are podcasters or videobloggers -- Veronica Belmont, Julia Allison, and Alana Taylor among them. They're all great people, amazing at what they do, but that leaves few girls who are hardcore geeks. There aren't many girls starting their own companies. It's almost expected that I go into community or marketing, but I've since decided to go against these societal expectations.

I'm now at a crossroads in my educational career because I need to decide my major. Do I major in computer science, economics, international relations, or what? As a friend of mine mentioned, what if I'm terrible at computer science or what if I'm terrible at economics? The educational path I choose will determine the people I associate with in my classes. The computer science program at Simon's Rock attracts the uber geeks, whereas the economics program attracts the more popular kids. Why does this matter so much? Because I see education as being more than what's learned in the classroom -- it's the independent projects that I would start with my classmates. It affects my social life, which matters more than you might think for girls. Regardless as to what major I choose, I'll plan on surrounding myself with both econ and comp sci people.

As time goes by, the negative image of computer science and geeks will fade away. With more "socially capable" individuals in computer science, people like myself will feel more inclined to choose a math or science related subject as a major. I met Leah Culver at a dinner in Amsterdam, and her story is inspiring. She went to school thinking that she'd go into art or graphic design, and left with a degree in computer science. She did what she felt passionate about, and others like myself will follow in a similar path. Just last week, I met a girl through my blog named Cassie Wallender, who also began college at age 16 and took up programming and business from an early age. In the coming few years, we'll hopefully see more and more girls flooding the halls of science departments!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early college, Bard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

Isn't it frustrating when you do something "wrong" and a random person tells you that you can't do it because it's against the company/school/organization's rules? This can be in reference to virtually anything -- a hotel employee or restaurant waitress tells you that you're not allowed to do something because it's against company policy. The issue being that this so called employee has no clue why the rules exist in the first place! If your company has rules in place, make sure that employees know why they exist. Make sure your employees can offer good explanations for why they exist and reasonable alternatives around them. Real life example:

1) As I write this blog post, I'm in Boston. As I was checking into my hotel, I noticed a hotel customer and hotel employee arguing over something. The hotel customer was clearly a tourist and had brought in a cooler box, when the employee stopped him. Apparently, cooler boxes weren't allowed into the hotel. What? Why? Of course, the hotel employee didn't know why. He responded by saying, "it's just against hotel policy." Now why isn't this explanation good enough? Because the customer gets even MORE aggravated. He's thinking what to do with this cooler box he just bought. What does he do with the many drinks inside? The proper response would be for the hotel employee to say something among the lines of, "You can’t bring the cooler box inside because it's against state law, but I'd be happy to hold onto your cooler box until the end of your stay." Except how many employees are trained to do this?

2) Or another example I've dealt with throughout my childhood: Teachers asserting authority by punishing kids for rules that haven't a reason to exist: I was sitting on my friend's lap when a random school aid told me not to. I got off her lap and asked the school aid why I wasn't allowed to sit on her lap. Of course, being that I'm Jessica Mah, I get accused of being an arrogant teenage brat because I'm curious enough to ask about the reasons for rules existing. Next thing I knew, I was being threatened detention and a trip to the principals office. Had it ever occurred to the school aid that it was a stupid rule that should be changed? Probably not -- it makes them feel good about themselves to assert their authority over me. In an ideal world, the school aid would tell me why I can't sit on the persons lap. If the school aid doesn't have an answer, she would tell the school principal that the rule was meaningless, and that it be removed.

The bottom line: If your customer does something that's "against the rules," be prepared to give them a good reason as to why the rules exist, and promptly propose a suitable alternative. If no alternative exists, make one, even if it isn't your fault. If my flight from New York to San Francisco is delayed, I don't care that your plane broke down and I don't care what your reimbursement policies are. I want a suitable alternative or reimbursement. Make sure your employees know precisely how to react in these "unique" situations, and what they are authorized to offer as alternatives. Better yet, tell your employees that they can do whatever they would like in order to please the customer. If customer service is your number one priority and you give employees full authorization to do whatever they want to meet that mantra, your customers will be satisfied even when they can't do something or if you're not allowed to let them do something. I promise!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early collegeBard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

The following post was inspired by a breakfast conversation I recently had with a successful entrepreneur:

If there's a single thing you should take away from business school, it is to ignore sunk costs If your company is going nowhere, cut your losses and move on.

There are three things that could happen to your company: 1) It can succeed by going IPO, getting acquired, or by making a modest profit. 2) It can fail. 3) It could go nowhere. The absolute worst thing that can happen to for it to go nowhere. Few thoughts:

Firstly, it's widely agreed that entrepreneurship is best while young. You're the most ripe for doing business from the second you finish school up until your mid-late 30s because you have less to lose. At a younger age, you're more connected to what's going on in the industries you're associated with. If you start a company in your early 20s and the company drags on for more than a few years, you're wasting precious time. If you don't see lots and lots of growth or if your company's not bringing in cash, cut your losses within a few months of starting the company and move on to the next opportunity.

If your company lacks a business model, yet it continues to grow, you should have the option to sell out. Matter of fact, you should probably think long and hard about selling such a business after two to three years of working on it. If you had a serious business model that proved to be effective, this would be different. Given that the company is (supposedly) growing, you'll probably be getting acquisition offers left and right. What's important is that you always have the option to sell. The discussion of selling a company will vary from person to person. There is no correct way to do this, because while some entrepreneurs prefer to exit early, others prefer to create businesses for the long term.

Remember when Mark Zuckerberg was offered billions by Yahoo to sell Facebook? Many of us critiqued him for not selling, because the future of Facebook was unknown. Most of us would kill to sell our company for even a few million! But his reasons for not selling probably weren't monetary related. If Zuck had $2B VS $20B, the course of his life wouldn't change all that much. He wants to build a true business for the long run, and selling out to yahoo would be premature. As long as Facebook continues to grow, he has the option to exit.

For other companies that either aren't growing or aren't finding a way to exit, cut your losses sooner rather than later. If you start a company and within three months, you realize that you don't click with your co-founder, get out. He or she is wasting your irreplaceable time and energy.

Even if you know that it's time to get out, it can be incredibly difficult to sell. After all, you've been growing your business as if you were raising a child. Sending your child to college is always difficult -- sending your child to college years before the average child goes is even more difficult. I see selling businesses in a very similar light. It's different from person to person, and when the time is right, you'll know when to exit.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early collegeBard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

Most of you have only met the superficial version of me. I've been thinking a lot about my personal brand in the recent weeks, and I've come to a few major decisions as to how I want people to perceive me. Through my blog, I have complete discrepancy as to how and what I write about myself. Until lately, it's been completely overdone. For some silly reason, half the people who have heard of me perceive me as a child prodigy. The other half either think I'm arrogant or don't care. The purpose of this blog post is to tell you that I'm more of the normal teenage girl than you probably think.

Firstly, I don't deserve the credibility that I have. I'm out there in the tech world and I'm sometimes mentioned on people's blogs. Big deal! I haven't sold a successful startup and I don't have a product that I've launched this year. Yet somehow, I get invited to speaking engagements and other fancy elitist groups. Instead, you should see me for and only for my enthusiasm and potential. I'm off to an early start, but in a few years, that won't matter. Nobody will care in 10 years that I went to college early and failed at a few startups when I was 16 years old. I guess I'm slightly worried that I've been spending too much time talking to you guys and not enough time doing something great. Until I find amazing success, none of you should have the right to call me smart.

Next, I much rather you guys view me as a child prodigy than as a whore. Sure, my personal branding has been overdone, but at least it was overdone in a somewhat positive direction. Unlike Paris Hilton, people have a slight clue as to what I want to do with my life. Smarts are sustainable, looks are not. As one of my friends said, "if you're going to be famous, at least have a business model." People associate my name to business and technology. As for Paris Hilton, well, people look at her as a hot girl with an empty brain. No matter how hard she tries to change her personal brand, people will be stuck in their old ways of thinking. So, if you overdo your personal branding, "do it with a business model" :)

Internet celebrity Julia Allison wrote on her Tumblr yesterday:

I’m in the midst of a transformation right now. Actually, it’s not so much an internal transformation (although there’s that, too) but a realignment - so my outside matches my inside, so the perception matches the reality.

The quote just comes to show that people don't understand who she is. They read about her in Valleywag, but they don't know how fun, enthusiastic, and smart she is in real life. I've been told so many times by my blog readers that I'm different from how they thought I'd be. Some thought that I'd be formal, proper, intelligent and well-spoken, whereas others thought I'd be a snotty-arrogant-uptight-child-prodigy-bitch. One reader suggested that I overdid my professional brand, whereas Julia blurred her personal and professional brands together.

In real life, I'm just an adventurous teenager. I like to do something called having fun. I have something called friends. I go to class, I do my homework, I play instruments, I play sports, and do all the things you'd expect a normal 17 year old kid to do. (minus the many fun business/tech trips I've been on). Sure, I'm in college, but that doesn't mean much about my personality. Instead, try to see through the fog: all of the random bloggers you stalk are real human beings and have lives outside of the internet. Their personal brand may be completely deceiving for all you know.

Like many girls, I've had that desire to have the spotlight on me. And I've gotten quite a lot of spotlight for a girl my age, but I've come to realize that it's nothing more than a distraction. I'm dedicating too much effort to building up my personal brand and not enough in a) leading a normal teenage life and b) working on doing something amazing, whether it be save the world or build a hot startup. As one of my friends Charlie mentioned, the most brilliant people he knows prefer to keep in the shadows. They don't have much of a personal brand, but their smarts and successes create the true credibility one needs to be known. I guess as of late, this idea has been much more appealing to me.

So what does all of this mean for you, me, and my future in blogging?

1) The blog lives on. I'll always continue to blog because I love you guys so much!

2) I've decided to cut wayy back on my conference going. I have many connections as it stands and I don't need to waste more time networking with 50 year olds.

3) You hopefully won't have to see me on Valleywag again. As I've mentioned in other posts, the influx of press gives you a temporary high.

4) It's soo easy to get drawn into the fun culture of Silicon Valley. It's so easy that you sometimes forget to create something of value.

So for now, I'll try to stay in the shadows. I have no problem speaking at conferences or doing interviews or whatever, but I'll remain honest and true to myself: I'm a kid who's yet to succeed in business.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup and the managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. Big thanks to my friends Jacob Locke, Patricia Handschiegel, and Charlie O'Donnell for having helped me gather my thoughts on this.

I'm often asked if I plan on dropping out to start a company. Plenty of people see school as being absolutely useless, but the older people I speak to (30+) tell me to stick in school, party my butt off, study abroad, and have a good time. In the past year alone, I've gone back and forth on the two ideas. In the end, I've decided not to. Here's why:

This past summer, I was almost set on dropping out. I finished high school before I turned 16 and decided that I was too cool for school. I felt tempted by the success stories of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and many others. Only problem being that my very early experiences turned me into an arrogant little child. I've since spent hours speaking to seasoned entrepreneurs, including my loved mom and dad, about the importance of college for a young person like me. We decided that I need college more than most people BECAUSE I finished high school early. I never got the normal childhood experience.

Big shocker: To be quite honest, I can't name more than a few people besides my parents who understand who I am beyond the superficial level. There's more to me than most of you can ever fathom. Most people see me in one of two ways:

1) I'm an arrogant brainchild who's destined for failure.

2) I'm smart and destined to do great thing. My positive reputation is well deserved.

And with great honesty, I see myself somewhere in between. I'm smart enough to be in college, but I'm not smart enough to be able to drop out. I've accepted the fact that I'll often write incredibly stupid things on my blog only to regret having written them hours later. Fact is, I'm still learning. I'm still a teenager and it's very easy for people to forget that. The expectations people have on me is incredibly high. If anything, my Asian parents have lower expectations of me than anyone else does because they understand that I'm still a kid, regardless of how mature I may seem. As a teenager, I still don't know who exactly I am or where I'll end up being in 5 years.

But a few things I know for certain: I'll stay in college for all four years and still get my degree before turning 20 anyway. And once that happens, I'll be ready to focus full time on a company I'm passionate about.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com.

I'm debating with myself... should I go to the South by Southwest conferece (and parties) or go to school? If I decide to go, I'll have to fork over about $1200 in hotel/airfare/etc and cut two days of school. My dad says no, but I'm confident that if all of my blog readers emailed him, he would change his mind. Just kidding!

Just a year ago, I cut three days of school to go to the Oreilly Web 2.0 conference. It was a crappy conference and I learned absolutely nothing, but the friends I made were priceless. Matter of fact, if I hadn't cut those three days of school to go to the Web 2.0 conference, you probably wouldn't be reading my blog.

Which brings me to the question: SXSW or school? Will I meet awesome people or will I just get bounced out of every party because I'm underage? I'll let you guys vote on this one.

PS - I gave you an "other" option in case you have something better to suggest.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.

Who knew that our world's youth would become so internet obsessed to a point where there'd be rehabilitation camps for these nerds?

Simply put, we're becoming so reliant on our computers for everything. Our communication, our finances, our news, our homework, our research, our fun, etc... it just never stops. If you find that your children or significant other(s) are becoming too much geeky for their own good, send them to rehabilitation camp, where they'll be taught to appreciate the REAL world!

Just imagine yourself at such an awesome place:

According to the Post, one clinic in the Beijing suburb of Daxing keeps some of its 12 to 17-year-old patients locked in rooms with barred windows for most of the day, treating them with a combination of counseling, medication, and military-style discipline. At the Daxing clinic, these troubled teens whose "souls are gone to the online world" are housed together on the third floor of the building, where they are subjected to hypnosis and even mild shock therapy in an attempt to rid them of their love of surfing.

Hmm... sounds like summer camp to me! I sense a minor problem with all of this. The people running these camps may not understand the root of the problem. Many 12-17 year old boys become computer obsessed nerds because they find more success and popularity in the virtual world, whether it be via Myspace or World of Warcraft. Matter of fact, one of these geeks just so happens to be a cousin of mine. There's no stopping him from shooting to his computer immediately after school. His social life at school is pathetic, but he's definitely thriving in Warcraft.

The geek rehabilitation camps are trying to treat the symptoms. It's all about punishment without relating actions to a core reason, which definitely isn't sustainable over the entire course of a nerd's life. Chinese people seem to have the problem of punishing and instilling fear in people rather than actually teaching them something. For example, If I went to China and openly admitted my bisexuality, I'd basically be signing myself up for intense shock therapy. (
However, if any of you come across a geek rehabilitation camp that doesn't use isolation and shock therapy for treatment, please let me know! I'll pass it onto my geeky Cousin.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.

Everybody talks shit about boarding schools. The movies make it seem like such a terrible thing. When kids do drugs, when they get poor grades in school, they get sent away to boarding school. Bummer.

I bought into this crap and could have spent my first few years of high school at a boarding school. I didn't realize any of this until my sophomore year of high school when I decided to apply to boarding schools and to college early. The reality is, boarding school is sort of like summer camp but all year round.

I ended up not going to boarding school. I got into the Putney School and Northfield Mount Hermon, but decided to skip all of the crap and just go to college. I think I made the right choice. A few short weeks after I made my decision, my younger brother (13 at the time) got into Northfield Mount Hermon.

At first, he wasn't happy with the idea of sending him away. He probably felt like a criminal, but that's because he is. So we sent him away and he's been loving it. Why? Because there are no parents. Less supervision. Friends are footsteps away. Nonstop activities without transportation needed. Why doesn't everyone just go to boarding school if it's this amazing then?

Because it's mad expensive. Summer camps cost a fortune, so why wouldn't boarding schools? Worst case scenario, you can always send your child to a conservative religious boarding school or a drug rehab boarding school :)

Funny enough, I got the idea of going to boarding school when I read the gossip girls. It talked about a girl having crazy sex and freedom in boarding school. (no, that wasn't meant to imply anything) But funny thing is, this anorexic crazy bitchy girl from my high school got me to read gossip girls which got me to read about freedom in boarding school which got me to look up boarding schools on the internet which got me to hire a school consultant who got me to look into going to college early which allowed me to explore entrepreneurship and cut school to travel to San Francisco and get credits for it which got me into blogging which is what I'm doing this very moment. Interesting how things work out! This just comes to show that sometimes, the most insignificant people in your life may end up being the most influential ones if you think about it. I remember thinking about how this girl was such a nasty bitch, but I really owe her a thank you for saving two years of my life!

I just wish people stopped making dumb generalizations. Just because there are lots of drug rehab boarding schools doesn't mean that all boarding schools are for trouble makers. But again, generalizing happens in all facets of life.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.