Raymond Hou (Raymond) entered the Department of Chemical Engineering at National Cheng Kung University in 2012 and graduated in June 2019, spending six years at the university. During that time he changed majors twice (chemical engineering → industrial and information management → the university-wide interdisciplinary program), extended his studies by two years, completed 184 credits, and received his degree at age 24.1 Raymond has often described these six years as the key stage in his shift from being “a good student who followed the rules” toward freelance and remote work, and as the origin of his own “Super Individual” path. Related concepts are discussed in Super Individual, Career Development, and Growth Mindset.
Entering chemical engineering and the track he could not catch up with
In junior high, Raymond had been near the bottom of his class. After a major family change in ninth grade, he began working hard at school, entered the affiliated high school of National Taiwan Normal University after the academic exam, and then enrolled in chemical engineering at NCKU, then regarded as a leading science and engineering university. He entered the department with the self-image of someone who “was good at studying,” but over his first two years his top-performing classmates continually pulled ahead. Despite his efforts, his overall average only ranked 16th in a class of 45. At the same time, he had to pay his own tuition and living expenses, was chronically short on time, and his physical and mental health deteriorated. He compared this experience to the tortoise and the hare: on the academic track, he was a tortoise that could not catch the hares. He concluded that this path was not right for him.2
Student organizations and off-campus projects: AIESEC, N Power Workshop, and City Wanderer
From his first year, Raymond chose not to join traditional campus clubs and instead invested his energy in off-campus organizations and projects. During his first and second years, he participated deeply in AIESEC, the international student organization (International Association of Students in Economic and Commercial Sciences). This became an important early arena for exploration: it exposed him to business management and project work beyond a purely engineering background, introduced him to some of his closest university friends, and led to his first 35-day independent trip to India during winter break at age 18.3 In his first year, he also organized a flash-mob dance on campus, briefly continuing his love of Urban Dance from junior and senior high school.4
After leaving AIESEC, however, Raymond reflected deeply on the aura surrounding student organizations. In a public review in 2015, he noted that many students basked in the colorful bubble of AIESEC’s title as the “world’s largest youth organization,” or claimed the organization’s achievements as their own in interviews without having real experience doing the work or professional skills. He emphasized that the key measure of an organizational experience was not one’s title or the organization’s scale, but “whether the process gave you expertise, thinking, practice, and stories.”3
Inspired by his AIESEC experience, Raymond brought the “City Wanderer” program to Tainan and launched the first Tainan City Wanderer, hoping to help university students leave campus and get to know the city. From 2013 to 2014, he and his partners founded N Power Workshop (N 次坊), encouraging students to learn independently and training them to become instructors. They also organized “Co-Creation Era,” a gathering for entrepreneurs in southern Taiwan, corporate visits, and took part in the Taiwan–US Student Conference. These activities were not taught in class, and most teachers advised him not to do them. Raymond believed that these self-chosen projects, which he tried with his own hands, gave him a sense of agency and control.
In a 2020 retrospective post, Raymond organized his university years into a path of “atypical learning”: joining a K-pop dance crew in high school; traveling independently in India in his first year; working on a social-enterprise startup project; holding the first Tainan City Wanderer in his second year; bringing the model of Hong Kong’s MaD annual event back to Taiwan; beginning his path as an instructor through N Power Workshop in his third year; returning to an interdisciplinary genetic engineering competition in his fourth year; and joining a Korean company and the university-wide interdisciplinary program in his fifth year. He wrote that he had “no club, no department student association, and no alumni association,” yet his university life was rich because he met many atypical partners along the way. He also acknowledged that his rebellious streak—shaped by his reflections on the high-school dance-club system—and lack of social polish had led to his marginalization in campus camps and institutions when he voiced different opinions, often crossing lines of interest.54 This retrospective placed “looking outside campus for what one wants to do” and “being treated as different within campus” in the same context, an important source for his later thinking about atypical careers and educational choices.
N Power Workshop was an especially early experiment in community and ways of working. By May 2016, a summer internship recruitment post showed distinct roles: social-media editor, “grindstone” (磨石工), miner, “warmth” role, and designer, responsible respectively for online community, speaker and content design, connecting learners and data strategy, team morale and talent development, and visual design. Raymond noted that people outside southern Taiwan could join too; he hoped to bring together people in Taipei and Hsinchu willing to work together into a distributed team.6 In July of the same year, N Power Workshop completed a three-day, two-night internship training. The team tested and revised its workshop design through hands-on work and planned a publication called Nature & Nurture to help outsiders understand the team’s spirit of “self-learning and mutual support.” This was the first time Raymond brought remote and cross-regional teams, internship training, community learning, a content publication, and the productization of workshops into one organization. It was an early prototype for the way he later discussed community and work.7
The beginnings of writing, freelancing, and remote work
In his second year, Raymond realized that Facebook was not just a social tool; it also revealed life options outside the mainstream. He began writing online about skills he had taught himself and his views on education and methods of working. At first, he had almost no readers and faced criticism from teachers and classmates. One teacher publicly told him in class to stop writing and study properly. Starting in 2015, his second year, he began fully remote freelancing and became a freelance instructor. He ran paid workshops near campus and paid his own tuition by trying to “produce in one hour what would take at least four hours at a normal rate.” In his fourth year, he joined the Korean company JANDI as a remote worker, which is considered the formal beginning of his remote-work career. Related context is discussed in Remote Work and Writing.8
Changing majors twice and joining the first university-wide interdisciplinary cohort
Around 2015–2016, as he moved from his third to fourth year, Raymond applied to leave chemical engineering. The registrar’s office and department tried to dissuade him, saying that “chemical engineering offers a stable career” and he should “hang on for one more year and finish.” He transferred to industrial and information management anyway. Around 2016–2017, he transferred again, this time to NCKU’s newly established university-wide interdisciplinary program, becoming part of its first cohort. He saw the program as a place where students who were a minority under traditional education could belong, and established a core judgment there: competence is the means; passion is the end. These two transfers directly led to his extending graduation by two years. In his graduation speech for the interdisciplinary program, he looked back on the choice in a relatively neutral tone:
“I once most wanted not to go to university, yet in the end I spent six years at NCKU and completed 184 credits.”
Reframing education and success
Raymond understands these six years as a redefinition of “what education is.” He believes Taiwan’s higher education still follows an industrial-era mindset, treating “meeting standards” as the only rule for achievement. The internet era opened a second option: create systems rather than merely meet standards. He cited Romain Rolland’s “One must see the truth of life and still love it” as his motto at the time, and divided growth into three thresholds: realizing that one is not the center of the world; realizing that hard work still may not make things go one’s way; and striving despite knowing one may be powerless.9
During the back-to-school season in September 2023, Raymond re-edited and published the full text of his 2019 graduation speech at NCKU’s interdisciplinary program, along with experiences shared by students from the first cohort. He decided against transferring each fragmentary article from university one by one, and established a “hub page” logic for consolidating knowledge: use the most central graduation speech transcript as the main article, link other important context within it, and make it possible to “send someone one blog post when they ask about it in the future.”10 This reflection on the singularity of success and logic for organizing content became a foundation for his later brand arguments and knowledge-base structure; see Growth Mindset.
Campus talks, orientation sharing, and micro-credit classes: the start of teaching practice
During his second and third years, Raymond spoke for several consecutive years at NCKU’s freshman orientation camp, “Becoming an Adult at Cheng Kung—Freshman Growth Camp” (for example, in 2015 he gave six sessions over two days on “Unlimited Possibilities Within Limits”). Although he received no payment for these campus talks, he believed that “education is people lighting people up,” and hoped that simple sharing could create a ripple in freshmen’s minds and help them avoid a period of confusion. More importantly, the intensive preparation, repeated public speaking, and process of refining tacit personal experience into concrete knowledge gave him substantial hands-on practice. Looking back later, Raymond said that the foundation for being able to teach so many courses and develop a teaching delivery system came from these unpaid campus talks and extensive practice.11
He later created an 18-hour micro-credit course at NCKU as a student, sharing digital work methods and self-learning approaches. It attracted more than 300 auditors from across Taiwan. This was an early experiment in turning his self-learning outcomes into teachable content, and foreshadowed his later methodology of “turning tacit knowledge into explicit assets.” Related context is discussed in Learning Methods and Education Is One Person Lighting Up Another; a Course Is Delivery.
Personal review: iGEM and “poor-person thinking”
In a retrospective review, Raymond considered organizing an interdisciplinary research competition for chemical engineering—the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition—during university his most regretted choice. The project involved building a team from scratch and seeking sponsorship from the university and companies over an extended period. It took about two years and brought almost no pay. Although the team won a gold medal, the experience did not help Raymond find a professional position because he had no intention of pursuing pure academia. Instead, he was exhausted from squeezing freelance work and talks into scattered hours. He summarized the experience as “poor-person thinking”: habitually trading time for money, ignoring opportunity costs, and not knowing when to cut losses.12 His resulting principles were that young people should focus on capability and professional positioning, and treat money as a result rather than a goal; when uncertain, first secure six months to a year of cash flow, then design a project that can both earn money and test an idea. This reflection connects with his later freelancing strategy; see Career Development and Time Management.
Significance and influence
The six years at NCKU were a process of Raymond leaving the identity of a good student within the system. Frustration with chemical engineering made him question a single-track path; off-campus projects and writing gave him another set of values; remote freelancing let him test whether a life in which he was responsible for himself was viable; and his two transfers and the interdisciplinary program gave that shift an institutional home. He graduated in 2019 as a member of the first university-wide interdisciplinary cohort and gave a speech, concluding this period with the words, “It turns out that people who persist in their ideals can live well.” These six years became the personal experience underlying his later arguments for Super Individuals and independent work.
Sources cited
Footnotes
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Hou Zhixun, “Course Tree Diagram for Six Years at NCKU: 184 Credits, from Chemical Engineering to the University-Wide Interdisciplinary Program,” public Facebook post, 2019-04-18. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “From Remedial Class to the Affiliated High School to Changing Majors—When Did I Escape the Blessing and Curse of Being a ‘Good Student’?” public Facebook post, 2020-11-17. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “AIESEC, So What? Don’t Get Lost in the Organization’s Halo and Colorful Bubble: Reflections from Someone Who Has Been There,” public Facebook post, 2015-08-24. View original ↩ ↩2
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Hou Zhixun, “Why Did I Stop ‘Dancing’?” public Facebook post, 2020-09-21. View original ↩ ↩2
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Hou Zhixun, “Atypical Learning in Those Years: A Long Share from a Close University Friend,” public Facebook post, 2020-07-07. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “N Power Workshop: Taiwan’s First Workshop Led by Student Instructors—Summer Internship Recruitment,” public Facebook post, 2016-05-27. View original ↩
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N Power Workshop, “N Power Workshop’s Three-Day, Two-Night Internship Training: To Produce Better Workshops,” public Facebook post, 2016-07-07. ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “I Planned to Study Xiaomi in Depth This Week, Then Realized NCKU Graduation Is This Saturday,” public Facebook post, 2019-05-27. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “NCKU Interdisciplinary Program Graduation Speech: Three Growth Thresholds for Believing in Education Again, Seeing the Truth, and Loving Life,” WordPress, 2023-09-16. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “September Is Back-to-School Season, and I Re-edited the Full Transcript of My 2019 Graduation Speech,” public Facebook post, 2023-09-16. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “Becoming an Adult at Cheng Kung—Freshman Growth Camp: Raymond’s Class Information, ‘Unlimited Possibilities Within Limits,’” public Facebook post, 2015-09-07. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “How to Get Out of Poor-Person Thinking? My Most Regretted University Choice Cost Me Two Years,” WordPress, 2023-10-03. View original ↩