I wish I could say I'd seen someone make this transition, but I haven't. People tend to be the people they want to be.

If there's anything I'd offer as advice it's to find someone you'd want to emulate and try and be more like them because you'll at least have a benchmark to measure yourself against. To a degree a lot of social interaction is pure acting as most people never express their purest intentions, so it's even reasonable to include characters in movies as suitable examples.

When you brush someone the wrong way, you'll probably feel it in some sense later on. It comes back to you. Often the people who seem the most insignificant, the most beneath you, are the ones that can do the most damage. You piss off the valet and he might do something to car that you won't notice for a while. Get on the janitor's nerves and he'll screw with you in subtle ways. Piss off your waiter and, well, you don't want to know.

Some of the rich and influential take the opposite approach of most. They couldn't care less what some big executive has to say, they're just an obstacle to their success anyway, but the "little people" are the ones they dote on. The people at the bottom know a lot more than they let on, and have power they usually don't exercise. Treat them well and you'll get what you want, and the management will be powerless.

I had an employee once that was a hard worker, a clever guy, and reliable enough that we'd tolerate his "eccentricities", but these would always rub other people the wrong way.

He had an unusual talent for engaging people where he could strike up a conversation with nearly anyone he met, but he also had the unfortunate ability to turn one of these surprisingly lively conversations into dead silence within the span of ten minutes. He'd commit a faux-pas so severe people would sometimes just leave without saying another word.

I'd try and explain to him that while he's entitled to the opinion that "it's just how I am" that it will hold him back. For example, I'd ask if he were in charge of hiring and there were two candidates, one rough, abrasive, a real renegade who told you whatever he was thinking, and another who was no-nonsense, a team player, sociable and friendly, and both were exactly as experience and skilled, then who would you pick? He'd say "the best one", which is a non-answer.

He quit a few times, and later, after a lot of internal grumbling, he got fired. People were tired of having to keep him contained, out of sight, or coach him constantly on "things we're not going to say in meetings again".

I've tried to deconstruct why he was in such a state. He came from a small town, the kind with a single stop-light and only one tiny high school. It's not hard to be "the smartest kid in town" in an environment like that, but when you go to a big city it's a whole different deal. Small towns are often stripped of their brightest, those with aspirations often moving to "the city" to pursue a higher education or a better career, it's not a good place to judge your relative talent.

On top of that, people are "smart" in different ways and experience, including education, can play a huge role in how effectively smart you really are. I know a lot of very intelligent people that are suffering from a severe lack of common sense wisdom and with marginal social skills.

Being intelligent isn't a license to be a dick, just as being famous or rich is.