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Comment by bksenior | Hacker News Reader

The other side of the coin are comments like this. "Finally, a new narrative!" This is just as lame as those that canonize him outside of his direct accomplishments. Steve Jobs had two MAJOR successes (Pixar and Apple). He was highly competitive and did aggressively oppressive things and had moments of integrity. I just wish everyone would stop trying to color his biography like they had to write a movie synopsis of his life in a a sentence.

Id argue that is the real lesson here. Be OK with being inconsistent relative to circumstance, if you believe that all great men held firm to their "codes" then you will fail in your emulation of greatness.

TL;DR Life's messy, people can't be summed up in a characteristic , Steve Jobs was a dick and a hero.

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The problem I have with this analysis is that there's an implied justification for being a dick as long as you're successful in the end. Too many people have taken this as the lesson of Steve Jobs.

Who's trying to justify their dickishness with the example of Steve Jobs?

I meet people all the time that think that stepping into his shoes is just a matter of being a total douche to everybody.

I've worked for people who have cited him as an excuse for bad decisions and obnoxious handling of other people.

Fake Steve Jobs's are a plague. They assume that they've already got the vision and creativity (often they don't, but every narcissist thinks that of himself) so the only thing they need to do in order to have that level of success (and admiration) is copy the bad parts of his personality... which is, quite frankly, ridiculous.

What they don't seem to realize is that Steve Jobs emerged in one time and environment that no longer exist. The opportunities that were available to a 20-year-old in 1975 in Northern California don't exist anymore. They're somewhere, but real opportunities are never visible (as such) at the time, so there's a huge amount of luck involved.

I have a hard time finding anything heroic in this.

He was a great artist, sure.

He was a great businessman, sure.

He also had crappy morals and did not mind stepping on people to achieve his goals. That including claiming "ownership" to ideas and concept created eons ago, and being abusive on the market. Sure, peoples lives are messy, but it doesn't justify bad behavior. And, bad behavior, bad morals, should not be lifted up as attributes of an hero.

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