When you are younger your learning rate of change is higher but you also don’t necessarily know what you don’t know. As you get older you start to appreciate that things are more complicated than they first appear. In school everything that you learn (besides learning how to learn) is already known. Mastery gives you confidence to approach the unknown which is life outside of formal education.
Mastery has been an incredible and incredibly humbling journey.
I'm not so bold as to propose I'm a master yet, but I've definitely hit a patch of "these problems are plaguing the industry and lots of smarter people have not managed to fully solve them yet."
What's been fascinating is I now have sufficient perspective to have thoughts and hypothesis of how to approach solving them, but the experience to have a sense of where I'll likely hit walls.
In the case of business it gets interesting because in many cases, if these problems have been solved, there's vested interests in making sure nobody else finds out how you did it, so these may actually be solved by some companies already and I'll never know.
This is my overall take on this. I don't think I' am getting dumber, I appreciate that experience has given me a more nuanced view on things and to be certain about something, unless that subject is really really narrow, is a type of ignorance.
Doesn't mean I don't hold a strong view on some subjects, experience has also solidified things that time has shown as essential.
