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Comment by macintux | Hacker News Reader

> But let's all agree he accomplished them in spite of these flaws, not because of them.

I don't know that you can separate the success from the flaws. It's hard to find truly impactful leaders that didn't have a large number of character flaws.

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It's hard to find people without large numbers of character flaws, IME. I try not to draw any correlations from those to success - I think the flaws in successful people are there because they're people, not because they helped them succeed. Were any of those flaws required to have Jobs' vision, or required to motivate people (maybe there was another way to get this part done than by being an asshole)?

I think that nails it. We x-rayed Steve Jobs’ character because he was so successful and at the same time controversial. Other people are probably no saints either but just fly under the radar or are much more interested in people liking them. He wasn’t. So what’s the big deal?

The problem is that there's a cottage industry of people who think they can cargo cult their way to Steve Jobs' success by emulating his flaws.

Lacking patience for people sensibilities can be a very good thing in high level leadership, but acting like this will always get you labelled as an asshole by people who take it personally.

Yeah every leader has flaws. But not every leader is an asshole on the level of Steve Jobs.

Only because people are flawed. It’s hard to find leaders who metabolize cellulose too. We can still try to figure out which parts helped and which parts hurt.

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