I’ve been investing a lot of time into upskilling myself in AI so I can share those skills with my team and help us work more effectively. But lately, it feels like the more I learn, the more work ends up on my plate. Is that how it’s supposed to be?

The problem with being the high performer

Price’s Law states that in any field, 10 percent of the people produce 50 percent of the work. Originally proposed in the context of academic research productivity, it was a way to explain why a small group of researchers generated the majority of published work. But when viewed through the lens of modern work culture, the pattern may seem familiar, the high achievers in a firm continuously innovates to be more effective. It’s a statistic that often circulates as a compliment to high achievers. But if you’ve ever found yourself in that 10 percent, the reality can feel very different. It’s not always rewarding. Sometimes, it feels like a trap. The pressure to maintain that level of performance becomes an unspoken expectation. The recognition rarely matches the effort. And over time, what initially felt like pride in your output morphs into a sense of quiet exploitation.
It’s a statistic that often circulates as a compliment to high achievers. But if you’ve ever found yourself in that 10 percent, the reality can feel very different. It’s not always rewarding.

In creative and professional teams, the impact of this imbalance is easy to miss but hard to ignore once you see it. You notice who’s staying back late and working on weekends, who’s solving the toughest problems, who’s asked to “just take care of it” because they’re the most capable. If you’re part of that group, you begin to internalise the idea that your value is in doing more. Not just well, but constantly. That kind of cognitive and emotional load doesn’t just exhaust you, it reshapes your relationship with your work and your peers.

The emotional weight of carrying the team

There’s a particular kind of weariness that comes from being the reliable one. You find yourself working at a higher standard, not because you’re aiming for excellence, but because no one else will. Over time, this creates a deep internal tension. You feel both proud and resentful. Proud that you can deliver under pressure, but resentful that others don’t have to. And that resentment isn’t petty. It comes from watching your contributions prop up a system where effort and reward are often misaligned.

What makes it worse is that the imbalance is usually invisible to those outside the 10 percent. When a project succeeds, the credit is spread thin. When it fails, responsibility is often concentrated. You become the engine of its success and cushion for organisational failure concurrently. This paradox chips away at your sense of fairness. You start wondering why you care so much. Why you push so hard. Why you keep going when the payoff never quite catches up. That’s when burnout begins to sneak in, not with a loud crash, but with a quiet erosion of motivation and meaning.

Leaders love the 10 percent, but do they protect them?

In most teams, high performers become indispensable. Their competence is convenient. They require less supervision, deliver faster, and make fewer mistakes. But this very reliability often leads to a dangerous dynamic. Leaders start to rely on the top performers too heavily. Not because it’s fair, but because it’s easy. Instead of raising the baseline, they just keep raising the ceiling for the few who can handle more.

The language of appreciation becomes a form of pressure. “You’re just so good at this” starts to sound like “You have no choice but to do this.” Over time, what was once voluntary becomes structural. Workload becomes unequal by design, not accident. And the 10 percent become less a valued resource and more a structural dependency. This isn’t leadership. It’s a silent exploitation of excellence.

What’s missing is protection. If organisations truly value their top performers, they need to design systems that protect them from burnout, from resentment, and from becoming bottlenecks. Recognition isn’t enough. Redistributing responsibility, investing in team capability, and ensuring performance isn’t punished with more work. That’s what real tangible protection looks like. And to me that’s proper demonstration of nurturing a good healthy work culture in the workplace.

So what’s the way out?

Lately, I’ve been asking myself whether it’s healthy to remain in the 10 percent, especially if it means constantly absorbing the gaps left by others. Is this sustainable? Is this fair? Or is it simply a cycle that rewards over-functioning at the expense of wellbeing?

The answer might not be to exit the 10 percent entirely, but to redefine what it means to operate there. Instead of doing more, perhaps the role of a high performer is to enable more. To elevate the team rather than compensate for it. That means shifting from execution to mentorship, from carrying the project to building a system that shares the load. It means holding boundaries that prevent silent overwork and speaking up when expectations outpace capacity.

This also requires internal work. Unlearning the instinct to prove your value through volume. Letting go of the urge to fix everything just because you can. And most importantly, resisting the myth that doing more means being better. It doesn’t. Not if it costs your health, your relationships, or your joy in the work itself.

A final thought

If you find yourself in the 10 percent, your biggest challenge may not be doing the work. It’s protecting the energy that makes that work possible. Burnout doesn’t happen overnight. It accumulates quietly, in all the moments when you say yes instead of asking who else could help. In all the late nights that go unthanked. In all the brilliance that becomes an expectation, not a gift.

This isn’t a call to stop being excellent. It’s a call to stop letting excellence be exploited. The goal isn’t to lower your standards. It’s to raise the standards of those around you, so the burden doesn’t always land on your shoulders.

True leadership isn’t about leaning on the top performers. It’s about creating teams where performance is sustainable, excellence is shared, and no one feels like they have to carry the weight of ten people to make things work.

What’s one boundary you’ll set this week to protect your energy?