Norbert Elias spent decades studying how 'civilizing processes' work — not through individual willpower, but through the slow internalization of social pressure until it feels like personal preference. His insight applies with unexpected force to career trajectories: the ambitions you think are yours have often been quietly installed by the field you entered. A technology career, in particular, runs on a specific prestige grammar — ship fast, scale big, optimize relentlessly — and most people adopt it so thoroughly they forget it's a grammar at all, not a law of nature. Friday is a reasonable moment to ask whether the next move you're planning is genuinely chosen or simply the next sentence in a paragraph you didn't author.

Name the single professional norm in your field that you've never actually questioned — one you follow not because you tested it but because everyone around you does.

Drawing from Process Sociology / Figurational Sociology — Norbert Elias