Abstract Narcissism is a puzzling construct containing many apparent paradoxes. The Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept represents an attempt to deconstruct some of these paradoxes. In this paper, we relate admiration and rivalry to the personality metatraits, i.e., Plasticity and Stability, in an attempt to demonstrate that the metatrait concept offers an interesting way of framing why admiration seems to be profitable for individuals, whilst rivalry appears to have a net cost. Based on previous studies, we examined how admiration and rivalry were related to self-esteem, impulsivity and personality traits in two prospective studies involving a total of 719 adults