"If you were listing the 1000 adjectives for Steve, kindness would not be up there," says Walter Isaacson, the biographer of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. "He seemed to live as if the normal rules didn't apply to him."

Of course you can bend reality if you truly believed the rules did not apply to you - this is called sociopathy. I would even go as far as saying such a person cannot help but distort reality. It is who they are. They behave according to their perception of reality. And that there are no real consequences to their actions.

The outcome of the actions of a sociopath (and I don't know if Steve Jobs is one) is determined by (a) how much power and influence does this person have (or have been accorded), and (b) what they happen to be interested in.

The more power a socipath has, the more people they affect - from a spouse or pet, to large groups of people in a company. The effects (from both personal experience and readings) are generally destructive and extremely negative. This is not surprising as sociopaths are unable to empathise with others.

A sociopath can produce a positive outcome (even as they damage the people around them in the process) like breakthrough innovations, ignite major conflicts like wars, simply through the power of their reality distortion fields.

I don't believe one needs to be a sociopath to create breakthroughs. We can learn to suspend reality in creative contexts, without losing touch with reality completely. To subject people to nastiness and damage in the name of creating some insanely great outcome is defeating the purpose.