I work with a woman who is very confident and loud, and who is always telling everyone else how good she is at her job and how brilliant she is. Part of my job is to produce a weekly performance analysis document for our boss (sales-based workplace), and actually this woman performs no better than anyone else. Yet the vast majority of staff put her on a pedestal as being the person they'd like to be like work performance-wise. There's lots of chatter about how good she is at her job, and she does tend to be very much a queen bee of the office. On Friday at work her chair broke and some other staff members were virtually falling over themselves to offer her their chairs and therefore be chair-less themselves.
It got me thinking too about a mum who I used to know when DD was a baby and young child via a toddler group. Like my colleague, this woman constantly told everyone how great she was. She also told everyone how expensive everything she bought was, how advanced her child was, how great her career was. And again was put on a pedestal as being the ultimate mum that the others all seemed to want to be. It got quite cringe-worthy at toddler group sessions listening to some of the others really sucking up to her and hanging on her every word. In reality, her child seemed no more advanced than children of a similar age, and the mum had a normal job as a part time nurse. I have no idea of whether she really did spend the amount she said on things though but everyone seemed to be taken in by this.
AIBU to think that people are often taken in by people who think they are better than others?