Rugged individualism is having a moment – particularly inside high performance culture. We live in a time where performance has stopped being something we do and quietly become something we are. We track sleep like it’s a leaderboard, treat step counts like a moral scorecard, and feel vaguely guilty when we’re not optimising something – our output, our routine, our diet, our inbox, our lives. In many high performance cultures, independence has become the ultimate badge of competence.
We’ve reached the point where people track their hydration like it’s a hedge fund. We optimise morning routines with the seriousness of a space launch. Someone, somewhere, is measuring their blink efficiency. And if you’re not improving by 2% this quarter, what are you even doing?
We check email on vacation “just quickly” so we can stay ahead – which is like going to a silent yoga retreat and bringing a megaphone to whisper. Even rest has become strategic. “Recharge” isn’t a human need anymore; it’s an efficiency tactic so we can get back to producing. Somewhere in the middle of all that, rugged individualism was elevated into a virtue. Needing help started to feel like weakness. Struggle became something you manage privately. The highest compliment became self-made.
That’s why a moment on Simon Sinek’s Podcast A Bit of Optimism caught me so sharply. Sinek was speaking to Angela Duckworth, psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and leading researcher on grit, and he used this term “rugged individualism” that I’d never heard of or properly engaged with, but instantly recognised in modern workplace culture.
Rugged individualism is the belief that we should overcome obstacles without relying on support systems – that strength is measured by independence, that success is most legitimate when it can be framed as self-made, and that relying on others is somehow lesser. In small doses it sounds admirable. In excess, it quietly undermines workplace resilience and sustainable performance.
For a long time, I would have said I didn’t operate that way. Professionally, I understood collaboration. I could speak about organisational resilience and systems thinking, and on one work front I wasn’t the lone wolf. But on almost every other front of my life, I absolutely was. I carried pressure alone. I over-identified with performance. I believed that if I pushed harder, endured quietly, and proved more, everything would eventually click into place.
It was brutal on my system.
Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just grinding.
One day blended into the next. Interest thinned. Motivation had to be manufactured. Work stopped energising and started draining, and because rugged individualism had convinced me that endurance equalled strength, I doubled down. What begins as professional depletion eventually becomes burnout in the workplace, and beyond. It seeps into personal life. It dulls conversations. It flattens joy. You try to fix it with productivity, which is a bit like fixing a house fire by rearranging the cushions. Eventually the system forces a correction. In my case, that correction was a mandated month-long break – it was no holiday.
Not recommended.
Rugged individualism doesn’t stay theoretical. It gets baked into high performance culture, into individual KPIs, into how we define “high performer.” It shapes leadership and trust in subtle ways. It lives in the unspoken rules that say admitting uncertainty is weakness, asking for help signals incompetence, and if you want the outcome, you should carry the load yourself.
The myth of self-reliance is compelling. It’s also incomplete.
When Rugged Individualism Shapes Team Collaboration and Office Politics
In the podcast, Sinek shares a university classroom experiment where group structure changed outcomes. He initially split the class into mixed groups – deliberately balancing high, average and lower performers – and told them they would receive a shared mark. The high performers objected, worried their grades would suffer. So he restructured: high performers together, everyone else in mixed groups.
The result? The mixed groups consistently outperformed the high-performer group. (Full explanation here.)
That’s not a classroom quirk. It’s a workplace pattern.
Here’s what changed, and why it mattered:
- Mixed groups: admitted uncertainty, shared the load, surfaced mistakes early, iterated faster.
- High performer group: protected status, avoided exposing gaps, competed internally.
- Outcome: collaboration beat individual brilliance, because learning moved through the team instead of getting trapped inside egos.
Now drop that dynamic into an office.
We’ve all seen the 2am hero – the person who fixes the crisis and gets applauded for commitment. We treat the 2am hero like a mythological creature – half human, half caffeine – when what we’ve actually built is a system that sets fire to itself and waits for Dave to bring a bucket. Instead of designing for sustainable performance, we reward heroic rescue missions and then act surprised when the building keeps catching fire.
We’ve also seen high performers who hoard information to maintain their edge. Individually, they shine. Collectively, team collaboration weakens. They protect information like it’s the nuclear launch code, when in reality it’s just the Q4 spreadsheet.
In the office politics and trust blog, I described the Fox – politically sharp, low on integrity, optimising for personal advantage. The Fox is rugged individualism in corporate clothing. When performance is measured purely at the individual level, office politics flourishes and psychological safety declines.
Sinek references in The Infinite Game how the Navy SEALs assess candidates on performance and trust. They would rather have a medium performer with high trust than a high performer with low trust, because trust is the multiplier. One high-performing individual who erodes trust destabilises the whole unit.
Trust sustains team performance.
Rugged individualism quietly corrodes it.
Designing Organisational Resilience and Sustainable Performance
If rugged individualism is embedded in high performance culture, unlearning it requires structural change. Organisational resilience does not emerge from individual heroics. It emerges from system design.
Three anchors matter.
Psychological safety at work. In the psychological safety blog, we explored how teams perform better when people can say, “I don’t know yet,” “I made a mistake,” or “I need help,” without fear. Rugged individualism trains people to protect competence at all costs. The moment people stop admitting mistakes, learning slows and performance becomes theatre.
Burnout in the workplace. In the burnout recovery article, the pattern was clear: burnout isn’t just workload; it’s isolation under pressure. It’s the slow erosion where days blur and energy flattens. Rugged individualism encourages carrying strain privately – and isolation under pressure is not resilience. It’s fragility waiting for a trigger.
Sustainable performance. In working smart vs working hard, I unpacked how autonomy and competence matter – but without relatedness, effort becomes hollow. Self-Determination Theory makes this clear: sustainable performance requires connection. Rugged individualism over-feeds independence while starving the very ingredient that keeps motivation alive.
Workplace resilience is not about how much one individual can endure. It is about how intelligently pressure is distributed across teams. An individual can sprint a quarter. A collaborative team can carry a year. A resilient organisation can carry decades.
You can absolutely go alone. You can run fast. You can prove yourself. You can even win. But if the whole structure depends on you never getting tired, never getting sick, never making a mistake, and never leaving – congratulations. You haven’t built organisational resilience. You’ve built a hostage situation.
Rugged individualism may help you go fast. But sustainable performance, psychological safety, and resilient leadership require something else entirely.
The question isn’t whether you can go alone.
The question is how long you can survive doing it.
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