How do I get past the fear of starting my first C# project?

Don’t wait until you feel completely ready. Pick a project that is small enough for your current skill level and accept that you’ll make mistakes. You can always turn a tiny exercise into a larger program later. The important part is building momentum and learning how to move from one problem to the next.

Choose something you actually care about instead of trying to build what seems impressive or marketable. Then reduce it to the smallest useful piece. For a to-do app, that could be a console program that adds one task and prints it. Once that works, add saving, then deleting, and so on. You only need to solve the next small problem, not the entire project at once.

Projects are supposed to teach you, so they don’t need to be successful or polished. Start with something almost laughably small, like reading text and printing a response, then add one feature at a time. Every error gives you a specific question to investigate, and those questions gradually become the project.

Break the idea down until each task is clear enough to describe in a sentence or two. Pseudocode can help: list the goals, split each goal into smaller actions, and keep going until you have a simple next step. If one step is still confusing, research that specific concept rather than searching for the complete solution.