I met Steve Jobs yesterday.

(By Sanjib Parida co-founder of Muvi.com. Connect with Sanjib on Twitter @codemonsoon.

steve-jobs

I met Steve Jobs yesterday.

Ok, the fake one.

In fact I have met many since he is gone.

Steve Jobs was an iconic leader of our times and he will live in many hearts for long.

Thanks to Jobs’ aura and the immaculate timing of the launch – his biography written by Walter Isaacson is flying off the shelves like free donuts from the office kitchen.

There is a lot of buzz about the man, how he did things and how he behaved in different situations.

People exposed to an overdose of this buzz – many of them – are under an illusion that behaving like Steve Jobs will make them charismatic and influential like Stevejobs.

This behavior is resulting in a byproduct, a pseudo cult movement that I’m calling “Jobsgiri” picking from the famous Lage Raho Munna Bhai.

Some people at our own team and from other startups that I have had a chance to interact are practitioners of it. Following are some of the symptoms to spot a person under the influence of “Jobsgiri”.

  1. Otherwise nice person is getting irritated at things that he/she was okay with earlier.
  2. Unnatural psychopath like behavior towards fellow workers in the name of quality and performance.
  3. Sudden realization that customers don’t know what they want.
  4. Picking up unusual hobbies like painting and horoscope reading as if hit with a mid life crisis.

In last 2-3 months I received at least 5 or 6 emails from people doing “Jobsgiri”.

I am sure, you also met/meet people doing “Jobsgiri”.

“Jobsgiri” is good or bad, I got no idea.

It certainly is a matter of personal choice and conduct.

I know for sure that if followers of “Jobsgiri” are picking it up with an objective of some kind of professional success like that of Steve that may not come.

Creativity cannot be sparked by enforced aping of a personality that you read about it a book. Creativity is triggered by things we hate and would like to change, it happened the same way for Steve Jobs he happened to not like the way computers were so he created.

Devotion to an idea, a concept or a personality type just because it worked out pretty well for someone else is a clear path for destruction. No one can be Steve Jobs without creativity, and in copying his ways you ensure that you never get to a position that he was able to achieve.

Our factors to succeed should be rooted in we being different and not in walking around as alter ego of a dead person. That path leads to being a cheap shadow of something, which will again change when another book with a little more compelling story is read.

I believe our behavior and conduct are a product of our sensibilities which have been developed through myriad personal experiences we have had in our lives. If someone’s bringing up has taught them to talk nice to everyone, I don’t see a need come up with situations not to be nice. That will be unnatural and highly likely to loose control.

I have made it a strict rule for myself to stay away from people doing “Jobsgiri” till it passes away as a fad and the original niceness is out.

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