It might just be the unspoken rebel in me, but it seems that I have an affinity for the individualists: Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, and Thoreau.  Individual cultivation, independent thought, discipline, and self mastery are the hallmarks of history's greatest thinkers.

Now, one needs to be careful with this line of reasoning and alignment of  other individualist "kindred spirits" since the emphasis of individual over others can be easily misconstrued.  In order to be an effective contributing member of any group, one needs to pave his/her own path, and achieve a degree of excellence, while making strides to not become too alienated from others: Actualization first, then Altruism.

In recent weeks, I've been following some of Jung's writings, and have decided to add him to my list of most beloved philosophers (for many reasons other than his writing on individualization).

Jung on the Development of the Personality:

"To develop one's own personality is indeed an unpopular undertaking, a deviation that is highly uncongenial to the herd, an eccentricity smelling of the cenobite, as it seems to the outsider.  Small wonder, then, that from earliest times only the chosen few have embarked upon this strange adventure.  Had they all been fools, we could safely dismiss them as ......, mentally "private" persons who have no claim on our interest.  But, unfortunately, these personalities are as a rule the legendary heroes of mankind, the very ones who are looked up to, loved, and worshiped, the true sons of God whose names perish not.  They are the flower and the fruit, the ever fertile seeds of the tree of humanity."

More Jungian wisdom:

"To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being and does not rise to personality, he has failed to realize his life's meaning.  Fortunately, in her kindness and patience, Nature never puts the fatal question as to the meaning of their lives into the mouths of most people.  And where no one asks, no one need answer."

Jung's commentary on The Golden Flower:

"Now and then it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond himself because of unknown potentialities, and this became an experience of prime importance to me.  In the meantime, I had learned that all the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble.  They must be so, for they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system.  They can never be solved, but only outgrown.  I therefore asked myself whether this outgrowing, this possibility of further psychic development, was not the normal thing, and whether getting stuck in a conflict was pathological.  Everyone must possess that higher level, at least in embryonic form, and must under favourable circumstances be able to develop this potentiality.  When I examined the course of development in patients who quietly, and as if unconsciously, outgrew themselves, I saw that their faces had something in common.  The new thing came to them from obscure possibilities either outside or inside themselves; they accepted it and grew with its help.  It seemed to me typical that some took the new thing from outside themselves, others from inside; or rather, that it grew into some persons from without, and into others from within.  But the new thing never came exclusively either from within or from without.  If it came from outside, it became a profound inner experience; if it came from inside, it became an outer happening.  In no case was it conjured into existence intentionally or by conscious willing, but rather seemed to be borne along the stream of time."