In 2016, I went on stage for the first time at an AppWorks accelerator Demo Day. I’d prepared for three months and revised the deck more times than I can count. Five minutes before going up, my hands were still shaking.

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The result? No one remembered what I said that day. Including me.

But I do remember one thing: the fear before going on stage was ten times bigger than anything that actually happened after I got up there. That was the first time I realized that the volume of fear is completely out of proportion to the volume of real threat.

This discovery was confirmed again and again on the entrepreneurial road. Houshen Market, Banmu Tang, the company — at every transition, what stuck me was never a lack of ability, but being paralyzed by fear before I’d even begun.

Fear Is Outdated Firmware

The fear system was a good thing to begin with. Tens of thousands of years ago, you saw a wild beast, your adrenaline spiked, you bolted, and you survived. The problem is, where are the beasts now? Yet our brains are still running old firmware — “being cast out of the tribe means starving to death” — to handle a work email, a rejected pitch, an awkward social moment.

This is a severe mismatch between biological instinct and modern society. Apart from life and death, every other fear is an illusion manufactured by the brain. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of what others think of you — these aren’t real threats. You’ve magnified the difficulty of the world tenfold, then deified the rules and trapped yourself.

Psychological overload is the invisible prison of mediocrity.

Demystify the Strong

The habit of seeing others as large and yourself as small is the main cause of draining self-confidence.

I’ve met many “legendary” people in the startup world. After getting close to them, I found that the rise of any strong person is essentially the combined product of the opportunities of the era and foundational resources. Strip away the halo and everyone is an ordinary person — everyone screws up sometimes, everyone has moments when they don’t know what to do.

Don’t let someone else’s light extinguish your own lamp. Everyone has their own rhythm. Only by viewing others as equals can you reclaim a sense of home turf.

Just Make Something Garbage First

The gap between a winner and the mediocre is 0.1 seconds — the mediocre wait for “foolproof,” while the winner chooses to “just make something garbage first.”

My own best example is this very website. The first version of paulkuo.tw was so ugly I was embarrassed to show anyone. But I pushed it live. Then, during those 12 days I wrote about in “A Hands-On Record of the Super Individual”, I used it while fixing it, revising it down to the version you see now. If I’d waited until I was “ready” to start, this website would still be inside my head.

Once you start moving, 50% of the problems disappear on their own, and the remaining 50% grow their own paths along the way. Resources aren’t something you wait for — they’re drawn in by your energy when you charge forward.

Mental Independence Is the Ultimate Trump Card

Switching from “seeking approval” to “self-upgrading” — once this switch flips, fear dissipates automatically.

This is exactly the state the I Ching speaks of: even when not understood, the heart is not troubled. I spent fifteen years in seminary, and the greatest gain wasn’t knowledge — it was learning to keep walking with no audience watching. When the main thread of your life shifts from “pleasing others” to “self-evolution,” a lot of things become clear: you dare to express yourself, because you no longer fear judgment; you can step into the arena, because you no longer agonize over gains and losses; you dare to persist, because you know destiny is forged through collision.

From Personal Psychology to Systems Thinking

This is the same thing as starting a business. In the circular economy there’s a concept called the “minimum viable loop” — you don’t need to wait for a perfect recycling system before you start; first run a rough loop, then optimize as it operates. Building yourself psychologically works the same way: don’t wait until you’re “ready” to set out — just get yourself moving first.

This is even more true in the AI era. The thing you spend three months planning, the world may have already turned thirty times over. Acting first isn’t a compromise — it’s the only reasonable strategy.

Correcting course in motion is a hundred times more effective than planning while standing still. Seeing through the logic behind fear — that it’s an outdated survival program, not your actual situation — is the opening move of a breakthrough.