I was involved in quite a few discussions related to Steve Jobs somewhere on the Internet, and people were once again waxing poetic about him in another post.

He didn’t actually create the technology, but he drove people who did. He was also not known to be a nice person at times, though all of that is anecdotal. I didn’t know the guy. Some people say he was nice. Mostly, though, they talk about how he pushed things forward.

He did. To think he alone could have done it, though, seems a bit more of a deification than much else.

In a world absent of Steve Jobs, do people really think we’d still be using scientific calculators? No. Someone else would have used the stuff from Xerox PARC, very likely, or reinvented it. Someone else would likely have pushed technology usability forward. In fact, the world is filled with technology that Steve Jobs had nothing to do with.

Yet some people study Steve Jobs and think emulating him is a good thing. That, by itself, is not bad – certainly, he had an eye for integrating things and pushing people, and he was effective at the time he was in. Would he be able to do the same now? Maybe. Maybe not.

In the grand scheme of things, he was a person who did contribute to the PC Revolution, and he did push the mobile revolution forward. Apple still charges way too much for what they sell (my opinion), and they are one of the longest standing vendor lock-in companies out there all the way down to the charging cables.

I’m not going to smear him. We’re all human. The point is that when looking at what he accomplished, some people use some of his less pleasant behaviors as excuses for their own when he was Steve Jobs and they are… not. In a world swimming in personality traits, tests, and a surge of advice on dealing with narcissists for some reason, emulating other people should be about taking their best qualities.

So often I hear things like, “Well so and so did it!”. Very good. You’re not original, and you can’t improve on that which you place on too high of a pedestal.

Do something original. Be better. That’s what Steve Jobs did, as far as I can tell.