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• Considering your boss "smart and capable" is perfectly fine, but it both:
  • does not matter in relation to how your coworkers feel about you
  • comes off as incredibly biased since you then continue on mentioning that you personally do very well in your boss' evaluation. It reeks of mutual favoritism.
• Why point out that you constantly do better?
• Why point out that you do much better?
• "I do better than the second best" is subtly trying to say "I'm the best" without outright stating it.

• Considering your boss "smart and capable" is perfectly fine, but it:
  • does not matter in relation to how your coworkers feel about you
  • comes off as incredibly biased and/or manipulative since you then continue on mentioning that you personally do very well in your boss' evaluation
  • is only being used as further justification of why this evaluation that puts you in first place is supposedly a really good evaluation metric. It's not intended to compliment your boss, it's intended for you to indirectly self-aggrandize.
• Why point out that you constantly do better?
• Why point out that you do much better?
• "I do better than the second best" is subtly trying to say "I'm the best" without outright stating it.

Here's another way of looking at it.

You are being a bad communicator. This is clear both from the feedback you are getting and the way you yourself think you should be interacting with your coworkers.
Cooperation and communication are key skills for any employee, most certainly a developer. So if you're a bad communicator, that makes you both a bad employee and a bad developer.

Since you're so competitive (one might even say it's in your nature), shouldn't you then be trying to be a better communicator? So why are you resisting?

If you want to argue your own worth based on adhering to your manager's metric, a manager who you claim to be smart and capable; then you should also be listening to your manager's feedback on how you are behaving and how you should change how you treat your coworkers.

Competitive people want to be better. So work at being a better coworker, instead of arguing why you shouldn't need to be or trying to persist the same behavior you're being told to stop.

Asking how to keep doing the thing you're being told not to do, based on your self-perceived notion of superiority, is the pinnacle of arrogance.

The opposite of arrogance is humility. It entails not always to think (or argue) that you're right, instead being open to what you observe / are being told, instead of what you think.

Your boss' feedback was spot on. Mellow out (i.e. don't see your coworkers as competitors), listen to others, stop trying to claim the spotlight or leadership position. Leaders are elected by their citizens, not self-proclaimed. That's not a leader, it's a dictator.

Leaders are elected by their citizens, not by self-proclamation or a power grab. You're trying to be a dictator (quite literally: someone who dictates the solution), not a leader.

Asking how to keep doing the thing you're being told not to do, based on your self-perceived notion of superiority, is the pinnacle of arrogance. What you're asking is no different from asking how you can punch someone without being perceived as violent. The exact thing you're trying to do is the thing you're being accused of.

The opposite of arrogance is humility. It entails not always thinking (or arguing) that you're right, instead being open to what you observe / are being told, instead of what you think about yourself. Second-guess yourself. Listen to others' input. Don't try to persist your ideas above all else. Assume you are not a perfect being.

Your boss' feedback was spot on. Mellow out (i.e. don't see your coworkers as competitors), listen to others, stop trying to claim the spotlight or leadership position.