Personal exceptionalism is when everybody tells you how and wrong and stupid you are and regardless you produce a superior product or convention. It wouldn't happen if you actually listened to the idiots around you.
Arrogance is telling the people around you how they are idiots instead of producing a superior product or convention.
Think about it in terms of your performance (output) instead of your opinions (what you say).
Thanks. How does that apply to high self esteem? Someone who talks a lot about how great they are projects high self esteem outward, while someone with an internal attitude of personal exceptionalism just gets stuff done and doesn’t brag about it? This is very interesting and subtle.
You know you have a certain level of personal exceptionalism due to proof of practice. In my personal experience I have formed the personal belief that people are generally deeply fearful and offended by originality. There is a minority segment of any population that is willing to embrace originality and try the new thing (whatever it is). If that new thing is embraced by those willing to give it a shot then (and only then) can it become a potentially experimental idea by the rest of the population, a sort of social validation.
For the person working on that new thing this is deeply frustrating. The early hostility is super depressing. You just have to power through it, because you have the personal vision to know that new thing solves a problem in a certain way.
Having gone through this more than once I have formed high personal exceptionalism. Due to my technical experience I now have a pretty good idea of what ideas are super great and what ideas are really bad, though from time to time I am still (rarely) surprised at just how wrong I am.
The consequence of this is that I am really bad at marketing and self-promotion. I would rather just work on my idea without telling anybody. Because I have a small following of users to my big github project I know people will end up using my code anyways. The biggest limitation in this approach is that you are effectively removing yourself from external feedback.
Low self-esteem means hating yourself. It means that even if everyone else can do it, you still think you can't.
High self-esteem means respecting yourself. It means that if someone else can do it, you thin you can do it too.
Exceptionalism is a mild delusion that says that risks and constraints don't apply to you. It means that if no one else can do it, that doesn't mean you can't.
Arrogance is about how you treat others, not how you treat yourself.
If you are in actual fact a statistical outlier, you learn to stop listening to naysayers. You don't need to argue with them. In most cases, what they think doesn't really matter.
If you told Bill Gates "You can't do X" and he had already done it many times over, well, why should he waste time arguing with you?
You can also be arrogant on top of that. But you don't have to be arrogant to believe your track record justifies an assessment that the limits that normally apply won't apply to you, or won't necessarily apply, thus it merits trying anyway.
Such people tend to find their limits by smacking into them at 100 miles an hour and it is usually not pretty. They do this because they just can't trust the judgement of other people who have told them countless times "You can't do X." only to be proven definitely wrong.
Arrogance is telling the people around you how they are idiots instead of producing a superior product or convention.
Think about it in terms of your performance (output) instead of your opinions (what you say).