For the past 10+ years, my "secret sauce" for growth was self-torture.

I have continuously pushed myself beyond what I am actually capable of at the time. That included brainwashing, and lying to, myself into believing I am talented at all fields; setting insanely high bars to meet; and various methods of self-punishment – including physical torture – when my actual performance did not meet those bars.

For the first few years, this seemed to have worked really well. It felt like I was always on some magical steroids that enables me to do anything. "I'm a genius", I told myself; "No one is better at doing this than I do".

Complements from friends I have met online only accelerated this flawed way of thinking. I was living in a self-created bubble; one that forced intense levels of narcissism, yet deep inside I was always fearful of this bubble bursting one day.

To keep the bubble from bursting, I had to become a professional of everything when needed. I learned how to code in x86 assembly in two months when I was a child, not because I had a desire to become a software engineer at that age, but because I wanted to brag about it to others – thus proving I am some gifted prodigy. I learned basic cryptography and associated math in a month shortly after, also because I wanted to be accepted and known as a child prodigy. I started learning basic economics in 2017 (later to be used with DeFi design) for the exact same reason.

I did not learn these skills because I enjoyed learning; rather, it was because I was torturing myself into believing I am completely worthless if I did not.

I was craving constant attention from others by constantly learning a new skill and working in that industry under an impressively short period of time – all to prevent my narcissistic bubble from bursting. This became so extreme to the point where my fundamental ways of thinking were centered around this fear of "it's probably not even worth living if I ever lose my competitive advantage; would be better to kill myself if that ever happens".

This deeply flawed approach to learning started showing its limits relatively quickly. The very first warning signs were already flashing when I first started working at a professional capacity as an engineering intern in 2011. I thought I could reach the performance of senior-level engineers as a child when I first started. It didn't take long for me to realize that was a completely unrealistic expectation; I was constantly being yelled at by senior engineers at the company.

If I had taken that as a learning experience – as every other intern does – and focused on improving my engineering skills in depth, then perhaps I may have become an actually talented software engineer before reaching adulthood. But I didn't. Instead I took that feedback from seniors as a threat to my narcissistic bubble. If working in software engineering could no longer give me the seemingly endless complements from others – both online and offline – then what's the point of diving deeper?

After a couple more incidents of senior engineers yelling at me for bad code over the next few years across a couple of other companies, I simply ... stopped listening to feedback. I told myself: "I'm a genius – I can handle this myself with open source code, online resources and books."

That's when my coding skills stopped improving. It was 2016.

(In my defense, those intense feedback sessions were definitely very traumatic for a young age – I still find code reviews traumatic to this day. If I had met an engineering mentor that didn't put constant, intense pressure and instead helped me turn these reviews into constructive learning experiences, then things might have been different. However, I should have been ultimately responsible for my own learning experience – I just didn't know how to learn things without pressure until very recently.)

While my extreme narcissistic obsession over being called a genius/prodigy gradually faded away, my ego bubble stayed. When I transitioned to running businesses and doing blockchain research/advisory in 2017, I genuinely thought I could become the next Steve Jobs. It didn't take long for me to realize Steve Jobs wasn't built in a couple of years, but back then that didn't really matter.

Working under Do Kwon should have killed this ego bubble, and I thought it did; in reality, nothing changed. It was only hidden during my Terra days. I was still afraid of the bubble bursting, because it had been a fundamental part of my thought process for too long – I couldn't imagine a life without it.

Even after I left Terra in 2021, I constantly had clashes with cofounders and colleagues. I was constantly being kicked out of companies and projects I have cofounded. Back then, I still didn't realize what was the issue – only now, in 2025, do I finally realize: it was the ego bubble. It never truly went away.

I always thought I was the best at everything (even if I didn't explicitly realize), and even if I wasn't, I could become the best in a few weeks or month's time. Yes, my ability to learn new topics extremely quickly was indeed very useful. But that never meant I was becoming an expert on that topic.

Another problem with this way of thinking was once I reached a level of expertise I thought was "enough", I stopped looking into it any further. This meant I knew a lot of topics but never truly understood a lot of them in depth.

Ironically, despite being extremely arrogant I was also easily swayed by other people's feedback – because I was craving for other people's attention. That was at the core of my entire thought process. That meant I had made lots of important decisions solely based on other people's opinions, without giving much thought to it myself. And I was busy justifying those decisions even if they eventually turned out to be wrong – because I was supposed to be the expert.

So far, I have identified three core problems while reflecting upon my past for the past two months:

  • I have never learned anything "in depth", i.e. enough to be a professional within a particular field.
  • I was extremely arrogant. I never really saw what was wrong with myself; even if I did, those were only touching the surface because I didn't want to admit I was looking at things the wrong way for my entire life.
  • Despite the above, because I was under constant pressure to perform like an "expert" at everything, there was constant burnout and extreme stress.

Those are only fixable if I start from zero and change the fundamental way I think about things. I doubt whether I'll be able to make this change in a few years, because I've been living with it for literally my entire life.

But this year – in 2025 – I've decided to at least attempt a change.

Learning how to enjoy learning in depth

I am a fast learner – but because of how my brain's internal incentive system worked, I have never reached a point with anything where people could call me a "professional" or an "expert".

My immediate goal is to first recover my software development skills lost to ego, time and drugs. While I do know a lot about computer architectures and CS, I will pretend I don't know anything and start again from a completely clean state. There are two goals to this:

  • Be able to ship production-ready, full-stack apps without AI assistance
  • Be able to implement what I already know well in theory – e.g. low-level GPU programming, cryptographic primitives, and certain deep learning/AI primitives

The reason why I want to start learning everything from scratch is because I have actually never learned software development the "right" way – and that often resulted in bad or low quality code despite (a) knowing it's bad code, and (b) understanding how everything works perfectly, at least in theory.

This is going to be an interesting journey down the memory lane; and at the end of this, I would (hopefully!) be able to call myself a proper developer again.

Other than software development, I am also hoping to gain a bit more depth in areas like advanced cryptography math (mostly number theory) and modern economics, while I work through rebuilding my expertise.

This is going to take time; I am not planning to rush this. It would be better to be a proper expert at things than a half-baked one; unfortunately, I have learned this the hard way.

Kill my ego and start from scratch

I won't be afraid calling myself a junior again if I need to. Pretending I am an expert – in areas I actually am not – definitely did more harm than good.

That might mean getting a junior-level job again if I really need to, whether that be for learning or to sustain myself. Most likely I would continue working on the things I want to work on, but this time I want to make sure everything is done correctly – and not be afraid to admit I don't know certain things well.

Take advantage of what I am already good at

Trying to become an expert at everything also did give me some advantages: for one, I was able to gain unique insights into the world at the intersection of multiple areas of expertise.

Pre-2020, I have wrote a lot of articles combining computer science, economics, and politics, and have gained a fair number of followers. I am planning to return to writing about these topics on this blog, as well as recover articles I have deleted sometime between 2020 and 2023 (with some help from the Wayback Machine).

I am also considering starting a YouTube channel (with the help of friends that are better than me at certain topics) covering topics with this unique perspective – why credit card networks are inefficient (economics & CS), net neutrality (politics & CS) and controversies over privacy-preserving tools (politics, social & cryptography) might be some of these topics. I will keep everyone updated if I decide to make this official!

This article was a long overdue reflection; one that probably should have been written at least 5 years ago.

I have only begun to realize what went wrong after a series of critical failures over the past few years. Frankly, a lot of the lessons here could have been learnt without actually facing real-life consequences – I had to learn them the hard way.

Nevertheless, it's better to admit fault than to never do it – and I am excited to start a new chapter in life; one that I am determined to build back better than any of my previous attempts in doing so.

Onwards!

-- Daniel