I watched that recent talk between Lu Yu and Zhan Qingyun a while back. Two very different women—one has been in the public eye for decades, surviving gossip and public pressure; the other came from a small town, worked her way through Harvard Law, and became a champion debater. But what struck me was not their differences. It was the exact same underlying attitude they both carry.
Most people think the way to stop being afraid of being poor is to make more money. The way to stop fearing illness is to eat kale and do yoga. The way to stop worrying about bad luck is to consult fortune tellers or buy luck charms. All wrong. That’s treating the symptoms, not the disease.
The real disease is this: you place your security in things that can be taken from you overnight.
Your job can be cut. Your health can crash. Your reputation can crumble due to a single incident. If your sense of safety hangs on any of these threads, you will always be fragile. And the fear will never leave—because you cannot control any of those variables.
What I saw in Lu Yu and Zhan Qingyun is a completely different foundation. Neither of them talks about “I’m not afraid because I have enough money.” They don’t talk about “I’m brave because I don’t care what others think.” That’s too shallow. What they show is something deeper: a quiet confidence that comes from knowing that their core asset—their ability to generate value—is not up for grabs.
Lu Yu has experienced being questioned, joked about, and even mocked for her interview style. She didn’t collapse because she never built her identity on being perfect. She built it on the process—preparing, thinking, asking hard questions. That’s something she controls. The outcome, the applause, the ratings—those belong to others.
Zhan Qingyun grew up without privilege. She often talks about how her parents weren’t rich, how she had to borrow money for her initial overseas studies. Did that make her scared of being poor? If you look at her trajectory, you see someone who rapidly invested every resource into her own brain—through education, debate, reading. She made her mind into a nearly indestructible asset. Once you have that, temporary lack of money is just a phase. Fear disappears because you know you can always rebuild.
Let me connect this directly to your worries.
You fear poverty because deep down you suspect that your current income stream is fragile. You don’t have a high-income skill that is in demand. You don’t have enough savings to cover a year of no salary. So you cling to your job like a life raft. But a raft can sink. The solution is not to worry more about the raft. It’s to learn how to swim—meaning, build up your personal value and a cash emergency buffer.
You fear illness because you know your medical insurance is weak and your savings are thin. Again, the fix is not to obsessively scan your body for symptoms. It’s to increase your financial buffer so that a hospital bill, while painful, does not destroy you. It’s also to stop ignoring your health as a lifestyle choice. But crucially, the real mental shift is: I will do what I can (eat well, exercise) and I accept that the rest is beyond my control. The fear comes from pretending you can eliminate risk. You can’t. You can only increase your resilience.
You fear life going wrong—losing a relationship, a public failure, a setback. Why? Because you’ve tied your self-worth to being “successful” at all times. That’s a terrible bet. None of us gets to walk through life without stumbling. The people who survive are the ones who see themselves as separate from their failures. They say: “I failed” not “I am a failure.” That’s a small but massive difference in mindset.
Now, if you want to actually apply this, stop wasting energy on worrying about what you cannot change. Start doing the things that make you more valuable regardless of external circumstances. Learn a real skill. Save a real emergency fund. Read books that sharpen your thinking. Practice public speaking or selling. All of these compound into an asset that no one can take from you—your own ability to generate money, solve problems, and bounce back.
Fear is not a sign that you should double down on caution. Fear is a sign that your foundations are too weak. Stop trying to wish the fear away. Strengthen the foundations.
After watching that conversation, I realized: the single most useful mindset a woman can adopt is not “be positive” or “trust the universe.” It’s the simple, hard, practice of building unshakable personal value—and then placing your security there, not in luck, not in appearances, not in other people. When your value is real, the fear of being poor, sick, or unlucky becomes manageable. It doesn’t vanish completely. But it stops owning you.
That’s the one mindset worth stealing.