Survival of the Weakest

Yishel Khan
3 min readJul 9, 2020

I flew down to Philadelphia to interview with one of the most prestigious healthcare accelerator programs. I was on my flight back and it had been 48 hours since I slept. My head was over stimulated by the exponential consumption of energy drinks (perhaps a little wine too) and rush of interviews. I was staring out at the luminous landscape of the city, as billions of neurons fired left and right in my brain. My lifetime was flashing in my head.

Ingrid Vanderveldt crossed my mind. What an inspirational woman. I had the pleasure of meeting her through Founder Institute. When she speaks to you, you can feel her looking into your soul. I remember thinking, ‘I wish I can be the same source of inspiration to young girls’, ‘Wait why am I thinking about this?’.

We all have had our moments where we dwell upon the meaning of life.

Why was I created?

If God exists, then why the disparity between the rich and the poor, the sick and the healthy, the free and the imprisoned?

What IS the meaning of life?

Keep this thought in mind; let’s jump to business rule 101 now.

One of the first lessons I learned as an entrepreneur was to never assume I am solving a problem for my costumer with my service/product. Validate your idea by interviewing AS MANY people as you can and try LIVING IT.

Live the problem.

I grew up in a society where the success of a woman is a rare commodity. Perhaps that is why it was so important to my heart to see a strong successful woman. That feeling. I want to share that feeling with young girls back home who lack the inspiration.

Let’s make the connection.

My shortcomings, the disparities I grew up with, my weaknesses are my biggest opportunities in life.

Who better to understand the struggle I lived through, than me myself?

Each and every one of us has lived through some struggle or event, that is close to our hearts and no one understands it better than us.

Tap into it and create a world around it. Because no one will know how to fix it better than YOU do.

It could be anything; business, politics, health, spiritual etc. Most of the successful people; Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Thomas Edison- have a misfortunate background story, and maybe there is a reason why.

Maybe our destiny is defined by our weakness. It’s how you choose to perceive it.

You can complain about your misfortunes OR you can use the force from within to tip the scale. In doing so, you will be helping others with similar struggles and if everyone did the same, we would evolve as a truly united community in perfect harmony.

I’m not a philosopher, but these are just my 2 cents on life :).

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Yishel Khan

👩🏻‍💻 Tech Female Entrepreneur 💫 Empowering women 🌱 Sharing experiences 🥑 Mental Health Advocate