This is a longer post stemming from:
There are ways to be very good at what you do and be an asshole about it to people who are not. There are also ways to be very good at what you do and attribute it to complicated reasons for why you’re good at it that gate keep what you do (reinforcing Imposter Syndrome). Even worse, there are ways to successfully gate keep what you do when you are mistaken about your own capabilities (Dunning Kruger).
I’ve come across many people who are very competent at what they do, and a varying degree of “niceness”1 and grandeur. 2
4 is the ideal (and anecdotally, the people I know who are outliers and successful are in 4 territory). In the remaining, the ranking in success I’ve seen anecdotally have been 1a > 1b > 3b > 3a > 2.
It’s therefore possible to be an asshole and succeed (1b is the archetypal Succession / Mad Men dark triad types). However, for the same amount of intelligence, it’s way safer to be in the green. 3b will be ranked higher than 3a and 2 by those in 4,1a, and 1b.
There is no other point I’m making here except you can not be sure which quadrant you land in via the y-axis, so it’s safer to be in the green (unless somehow you have a perfect oracle for how smart you are, which most people don’t and usually hilariously bad at).
People are very bad at judging how smart someone else is, but incredibly good at judging whether someone is an asshole given enough observation. So if it turns out that you’ve made a mistake about how smart you are, it’s safer to have erred on the side of being nice.
More generally, I think it’s also important to not be discouraged by the world your samples have been in a particular quadrant (for the same reason, it’s important to not judge other people who’ve only experienced red when you’re in the green).
Most things new and worth doing will require some amount of dealing with people in 1b, but it’s worth noting you don’t need to be in 1b to achieve what you want. It’s also worth noting because it’s extremely hard to spot genius (you can retroactively claim that you know how to, but it’s very tough), it’s worth treating everyone as if they are smarter than they’ve shown themselves to be (not that intelligence is any grounds to receive respect based on, but if this were your worldview, here is an additional reason to be nice).
I’m not sure where I would place myself in the quadrants - I do know that most things other people may consider me proficient in now are things where I’ve felt extremely ignorant in (and when I first started, people sometimes commented on how basic the questions I was asking are). There are some fields where proficiency is associated with intelligence, and it’s particularly dangerous to confound them when interacting with other people if your job requires you to select for intelligence.
Here are some links that remind me that it’s possible to be good at what you do and be a nice person, and some hopium for beautiful work :)
math - Think actively about the creative process
Many mathematicians are slow and real math is not about speed
Being a nice person isn’t being a doormat. It means to be a priori forgiving / open to people.
I spent some time doing math in college, and some people associated math proficiency with being ‘smart’ (and some people obsessed with coming off as smart as a result).