Aristotle drew a distinction almost nobody applies at work: the difference between *ergon* — the specific function something is uniquely suited to perform — and mere activity that resembles it. A knife that spreads butter is still a knife, but it's not doing knife-work. The same logic applies to career stages. Most people advancing through an organization keep doing the thing that got them promoted — executing well, delivering outputs, closing loops — long after the actual ergon of their new level has shifted toward something else entirely: shaping conditions, asking the right questions, creating room for others to think. The mismatch is invisible because the old work still gets done. It just gets done at the wrong altitude. The practical implication isn't to stop executing — it's to identify, with some precision, what the *actual* function of your current role is, versus what you've been trained to do by the last five years of reinforcement. Those two things are rarely the same, and the gap between them is where most plateaus quietly live.

What task did you spend the most time on last week — and is that task genuinely yours to own at your current level, or is it a habit you brought up from the level below?

Drawing from Aristotelian teleological ethics — Aristotle