Can someone explain Jeff Skilling to me?

A couple weeks ago I did another dive into Enron's bull shite and the thing that always confuses me is this: Jeff Skilling thought of himself as this genius-level guy who was doing big things and changing the world" or whatever. However, he also was cooking books (via Andy Fastow) to keep the stock price high because, and here is the kicker, most of his plans were utter failures.
So, on the one hand, it's easy to understand from a normal human perspective why he'd participate/push the fraud. Nobody wants their house of cards to tumble, especially when you had billions on the line if you could somehow finally get on track.
However, on the other hand, he was an incredibly arrogant person who (1) wasn't dumb and (2) truly believed in the concept of the strong surviving. As a person who has real parts of his inner being identifying with both, I cannot understand how he lasted so long living as the failure that he had to know he was.