"There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit."

In the long term, people who care about credit and can get it accomplish more.

Because having credit makes it easier to get trust and resources later. It allows you to take more risk without being affected when it fails. It gives you opportunities.

What's the point of accomplishing stuff without any rewards ?

Because you want something done and out of your way so you can do something more important?

I once wrote a piece of software specifically in the hopes that companies with shitty implementations would steal it just so I would never have to deal with the problem ever again.

People have all sorts of reasons to do things. Why are you reading this right now? Is it because someone will reward you for doing it?

If you are going to define purposes and motivations in life so narrowly, then I may as well take it to its extreme, get existential or nihilist and say nothing has any intrinsic value at all, so why do it? Of course we still do these things.

Sure, I agree, there are many useful rewards in life. And it's nice to pursue them.

But contributing, in the context of work, without getting some real reward, over time ? Just seems really unfair, and I don't like that feeling.

Trying to figure out whether you're too domineering and arrogant by reading internet articles is crazy. Ask the people close to you.

Not that easy -- some of them will just want to be friends / want you to feel happy,

and tell you what they think you want to hear.

So will internet articles, but they're designed by professionals. You think that's easier to see through?

But look, at least with friends there's a genuine understanding of you that you can try and dig out. An article by its nature has no insight into your presentation. It can't react to you.

There’s benefits in a healthy amount of both, doing it well requires balance like a lot of things do-plus the self-awareness and humility to reflect both on what you’re reading and being told by those around you.

I think this is the kind of area where almost all the advice will be so bad that you'll probably end up worse than when you started.

That’s quite a large brush to paint with.

Let me explain my position a bit more. Articles by definition can't analyse you. The entire medium is ill-suited to the task. They won't be able to take a look at you and give their interpretation, which is what you really need if you're trying to figure out this problem. Anything else risks being mental masturbation, but the less obvious implication is that articles have an incentive to be mental masturbation. They're much, much more likely to feed your ego than deconstruct it.

Commercial resources from major publications are obvious garbage, but look at non-commercial ventures. Look at the kind of people who read LessWrong - do they become easier to talk to? Less arrogant and obtuse, more receptive to nuance? My experience is they're extremely dense & hard to talk to. Why is that? The content of the blog is fairly direct in telling them the risks & flaws in assuming they know better, right? IMO it's because the blog primarily acts as an identity reinforcement device. The content is irrelevant, from a psychological perspective it ends up being used to reinforce & defend the identity of "more rational than others".