It took me a decade of work to realize that in corporate America you are almost always paid for being nice and helpful to your colleagues, rather than your individual contributions, no matter what level you are hired at. And this becomes more and more true as a company scales in number of employees (currently at a FAANG and couldn't be more true).

For me personally it was a major shift that occurred over a couple years transformation. Before:

- I used to be extremely dogmatic about my thinking, would get into "fights" over adopting the perfect technical solutions (i.e. API design, specific ways of writing a component, ...). I was insufferable at times.

- I would find, honestly, a bit of pleasure at explicitly shutting down other people ideas, always in a polite-but-clearly-condescending way, bonus if in public with senior leaders in the room.

- I would generally not help people, thinking that if I did my relevance as technical expert would diminish. Very territorial behavior. When directly asked a question, I would typically reply as ambiguously as possible.

I don't remember what caused it, but I did a 180 degrees shift at some point based on the mantra "I am paid for being nice" and:

- I am genuinely nice in meetings. I always cheer people up, and if I see a suboptimal idea, I never ever belittle the person who suggests it, and start asking very polite and respectful questions (almost always in a private conversation to avoid "public" grilling) until the other person naturally sees the point I was trying to make. If the other person is not receptive to the engagement, I drop it quickly. It is not the end of the world if a mistake will be made as a result of a suboptimal idea, and I could always be proved wrong.

- When a person asks me for some quick help, it is common for me to thoroughly answer and then also offer a full 1-2 hours meeting and explain them everything I know about that area, including potential insights about the future. I still have a tiny bit of “cockiness” from my old days, enough that people don’t abuse my very open attitude to help.

I had to change company to pull off this transformation, because my reputation as "extremely smart and extremely productive brilliant jerk" was too ingrained in my old one, but I am generally happier now. I think most coworkers would describe me as "Helpful and generally competent guy, easy to talk to". I like that.

I can see many "old me" coworkers around, it is truly sad to witness and I can't believe I used to be like that.