Another possible takeaway:

- Being excellent becomes a baseline expectation if you do it long enough so it's best you never put out your best possible work in the office?

Pretty interesting story, thank you for it! Seriously though, my main takeaway is that you can be a genius and not an ass -- at the same time. But in your particular example the guy was completely in his right to mock them.

And sadly yes, pride overrides a lot of other, supposedly much more important, factors. Learned that over my career as well and it's not one of the lessons that I enjoyed receiving.