What's actually going on with: You don’t need to be an egotistical asshole to be successful?

The short answer the psychology literature has been converging on for roughly twenty years is that you do not need to be disagreeable, narcissistic, or otherwise unpleasant to succeed at work, and the famous jerks who made it to the top are not the counterexample they appear to be. They are mostly a survivorship-bias effect: the difficult people who failed are invisible because they were not profiled, while the difficult people who won are visible because they won loudly. The interesting question is not whether kindness costs you anything, because it does in some narrow contexts. It is what it costs you, when, and what you get in return.

The first thing to clear up is what the research is actually measuring. Personality psychologists use the Big Five model: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (often flipped to emotional stability). Agreeableness, in this framework, covers traits like trust, straightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender-mindedness. A 2022 University of Arkansas study summarized in their news office found that agreeableness has a desirable effect on “hundreds of physical, psychological and occupational metrics,” including job performance and general life success. That is not a soft finding. It is one of the broader agreeableness-validity studies in the recent literature and it lines up with what most Big Five meta-analyses have shown for years.

The second thing to clear up is where the disagreeable-person-wins trope comes from. Adam Grant’s research on givers, takers, and matchers is the cleanest version of this. In his Wharton study and his 2013 book Give and Take, Grant found that givers (people who help others without keeping score) end up at both the bottom and the top of professional success. The bottom is full of givers who got burned because they helped the wrong takers. The top is also full of givers, because the same habit, applied with some self-protective boundaries, builds the kind of trust and reciprocity that pays off over years. Takers, by contrast, occupy the middle. The “egotistical asshole” stereotype is mostly a single-case fallacy applied to the top.

The third thing to clear up is the contexts where being disagreeable does help. The Conversation has covered research showing that agreeableness can come at a cost in specific negotiation and self-promotion contexts, and the IntechOpen review of the Dark Triad at work makes the same point with cleaner citations: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and subclinical psychopathy each correlate with different narrow advantages (negotiation entry salaries, comfort with risk, willingness to push back under pressure), and they correlate even more strongly with counterproductive work behaviors, team conflict, and turnover. People who are disagreeable on purpose can sometimes win a single negotiation. They lose the team, the network, the reputation, and most of the time the long arc.

What is going on with the trope in practice is that “successful” is being defined as the loudest, most televised kind of success. The dealmaker on the magazine cover, the chief executive yelling in a documentary, the founder who fired half the company on a podcast. Those are real people and some of them really are difficult. They are also rare. Most successful careers look nothing like that: they look like a person who showed up, did good work, treated colleagues well enough that those colleagues would pick up the phone five years later, and accumulated enough trust to be trusted with bigger problems. The University of Arkansas summary of the agreeableness literature points out that the same trait that makes you likable also predicts stable relationships, better health outcomes, and longer careers, all of which compound into the kind of success that does not photograph well on a magazine cover but lasts.

The pragmatic version of the question is: what should a person who is genuinely kind do to make sure the kindness does not get exploited? Adam Grant’s data on givers getting burned has a clear answer. Givers do worst when they help everyone indiscriminately and never ask anything back. Givers do best when they help generously but selectively, protect themselves from the takers they have already identified, and build reciprocal relationships with other givers and matchers. The Stoic framing that the original Daily Stoic episode was drawing on is closer to the same idea: integrity, self-respect, and clear boundaries are not opposites of kindness. They are what make kindness sustainable.

There is also a quieter finding underneath all of this that often gets missed. The disagreeable traits that produce the most visible success (willingness to interrupt, comfort with conflict, low concern for others’ reactions) are exactly the traits that are easy to copy and that produce the most spectacular failure when copied by someone who lacks the underlying competence. Being difficult is not a substitute for being good at the job. It is, at best, a multiplier on the underlying skill, and a large negative multiplier on the team’s performance around you. Most of the time, the most useful version of “don’t be an egotistical asshole” is “be willing to be the person who asks the hard question without making it personal,” which is a skill, not a personality type.

The honest summary is that the research is consistent and has been for years. Kindness and competence are not in tension. Agreeableness predicts better performance, better health, better team outcomes, and longer careers. The exception cases are narrow, situational, and almost always about protecting the self against exploitation rather than about becoming unpleasant. People who built careers by being difficult are not evidence that difficulty is a path. They are evidence that some people win anyway.

If you want a parallel piece on how AI is changing which skills compound over a career, the AI-and-your-job answer is the most directly relevant sibling. If you want to see how character under pressure shows up in a very different domain, the hero-memory answer covers how public memory rewards the people who held their line quietly.