So narcissists (as in people with NPD), if you've never had the unfortunate "opportunity" of being around one, are often incredibly good at convincing people to follow them. Take from that what you will.

People are attracted to self confidence, because most of the time people who are openly confident (down to the minutiae of body language) are in a position to be confident. The ability to simply be insensitive to the normal stresses and worries that would inspire rational doubt can put you in a position to lead.

Of course, you'll be leading with coin flips, and most people will fail. We just pay special attention to statistical flukes who make a lot of money before they flip out.

It would not surprise me at all if a significant percentage of that list qualified as narcissist.

Steve Jobs in his relationships with friends and family, and his own self-destructive (ultimately fatally destructive) streak screams full blown sociopath and always has. Then again, he might just have been a really shitty person without a personality disorder to explain it.

There's a possible simpler explanation: his work was always priority #1 for him, and he completely buried his head in it, to the detriment of everything else. Of course, now I'm also speculating some bullshit about someone I've never met. It's always interesting to watch people try to label others without having known them. And no, "had lunch with him once" or "heard him speak at a conference" does not mean you know a single thing about someone, their mental state, or their life.

A huge portion of the population is not made up of happy-go-lucky, oblivious-to-the-world individuals, and someone comparing themselves to public figures in some vain attempt to show just how nice and normal their own life is... sigh. There are what, probably over a billion people, that random strangers would label with all kinds of mental illness. If it's that common, most of those cases are not mental illness, - it's just a personality type. Another person having a different personality than your own does not mean something is abnormal about them.

The line between "Personality Type" and "Sociopath" isn't clear. There is even a school of thought that the latter is more rightly one of the former, than a disorder. Personality Disorders in general are difficult, and different compared to something like say, depression or psychosis. One possible reason is that they do not represent true disorder, but as you say, different "styles".

The question then, of when and if society or doctors judge someone to be ill as a result, is an open one. I think maybe in retrospect dying from a cancer he could have probably treated properly, and his various personal and professional setbacks (which he managed to reverse in some cases) paints him as more disordered than different.

My problem with something like "Personality Disorders" is that the definition and categories are determined by people who are deciding what is normal vs. what is abnormal or an imbalance. It doesn't matter if you can observe chemical differences in the brain; why are some common "configurations" categorized as being unbalanced? It's just a different configuration, and who's to say whether it's normal or not?

Labelling the people who do not appear to be afflicted by certain behaviours as normal, and labelling everyone else as something else bothers me. Doubly so when you're talking about something like depression that supposedly affects millions. Having a dismal outlook on life based on how our society operates (capitalism, dead-end jobs, government, lack of community, etc.) isn't a disease; it's just how some people see the world that we are forced to participate in with no choice of alternatives.

I don't buy into this mental illness craze that is sweeping across developed countries. When you have 10-20%+ of people popping pills for one thing or another, something is wrong. It's ridiculous. All the sheeple just take the word of experts who decide what is what. As a society we put far too much faith in these experts, taking their best-guess research and believing in it as if it's factually known to be accurate.

tldr; Our current understanding of the brain is nowhere near complete, and treating people for problems that may not actually be problems based on our limited knowledge bothers me.

Well, if you place your goals over the lives of those around you you may be a sociopath(-ish) even if you'd just phrase it as prioritizing work...

Not that I think the phrase has useful diagnostic meaning or anything.

>There's a possible simpler explanation: his work was always priority #1 for him

The thought he knew more than doctors about medicine. That has nothing to do with work being priority #1, it's entirely based on your head being up your own ass.

>and his own self-destructive (ultimately fatally destructive) streak screams full blown sociopath and always has.

I think there was more narcissism than sociopathy.

Sociopaths have a sadistic streak. They enjoy fucking with people's heads, lying to them, and destroying them. Nothing on earth makes a sociopath happier than the knowledge that they've screwed someone over.

They're actually more like human relationship trolls - from the "soft" versions who enjoy lying and cheating, to the much rarer dangerously criminal types who enjoy torture.

Narcissists simply don't care about other people. They don't enjoy torturing others - they don't think of them at all, except as an occasional inconvenience, or (ideally) as a source of praise and limitless support.

The Jobs dedication to getting noticed by the world for being "insanely great" combined with his tendency to use employees and customers to build up his self-image without being interested in them beyond that seems more like classic narcissism to me.

Am I understanding correctly that you are blaming an undiagnosed sociopathy for Jobs' death by pancreatic cancer induced respratory arrest?

> undiagnosed sociopathy for Jobs' death

Even Jobs realized his self-delusions had cost him some time, at the end.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-jo...

He decided not to undergo actual clinical treatment for his cancer until it was too late, instead relying on new-age stuff to heal himself for the longest time.

I wouldn't go so far as to call this behavior "full blown sociopath" but it definitely shortened his life. I don't know what the stats are for refusing cancer treatment, but I think they're fairly low.

They're lower, the higher the education and socioeconomic class of the patient, IIRC.