A core tenet of Forrest Li's leadership is that leaders must personally own and execute the most difficult decisions, like freezing salaries. He argues that pleasant and popular tasks should be delegated, while the leader's ultimate responsibility is to show up in difficult times and make the unpopular-but-necessary calls.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, a distinguished engineer advises senior engineers to delegate the most challenging, interesting work. They should instead take on necessary but unglamorous tasks, which builds immense credit and allows junior engineers to grow faster on high-impact problems.

While founder-led accountability is crucial, it's often misinterpreted. Leaders adopt a caricature of decisiveness, like mimicking Steve Jobs' harshness, which leads to micromanagement and alienates talented individual contributors who are key to scaling.

When a founder advises a successor to 'make decisions that energize you,' it's a strategic directive, not a wellness tip. It serves as a guardrail against the 'death by a thousand cuts' that comes from compromising core beliefs just to make others comfortable, thereby preserving the vision.

While one might hope to build a successful hardware company without being 'uncompromisingly demanding,' experience suggests otherwise. People are capable of far more than they believe, but almost always require extrinsic motivation. This tough leadership style appears necessary for succeeding in competitive hardware manufacturing.

The best leaders don't just stay high-level. They retain the ability to dive deep into technical details to solve critical problems. As shown by Apple's SVP of Software, this hands-on capability builds respect and leads to better outcomes, challenging the 'empower and get out of the way' mantra.

If a decision has universal agreement, a leader isn't adding value because the group would have reached that conclusion anyway. True leadership is demonstrated when you make a difficult, unpopular choice that others would not, guiding the organization through necessary but painful steps.

The popular myth of Steve Jobs's 'reality distortion field' is a misunderstanding. His true superpower was an exceptional ability to see reality with profound clarity and articulate it with the fewest words possible. This motivated teams to act on that clear vision, rather than attempting to bend reality itself.

Early in his post-exit career, O'Leary's private equity partners advised him to keep a low profile, as is typical in the industry. He rejected this, choosing instead to build a media presence to ensure he was "in the narrative," which he later leveraged for business and political influence.