Pretty good article, as a genuine "old guy" myself the thoughts expressed resonate with my experiences. Key thing is the willingness to keep on learning, accep

Pretty good article, as a genuine "old guy" myself the thoughts expressed resonate with my experiences. Key thing is the willingness to keep on learning, accepting the challenge of new ideas, glean from them their essential merit, incorporate into our knowledge, and in that way increment the value of old ideas. Two aspects of becoming older deserve mention. It came as a shock when people started to regard me as the "go to" resource to help solve problems the less experienced workers didn't know how to solve. Getting those queries left me wondering who was this "senior authority" they were talking to. Then I realized it was me. OTOH there's also the phenomenon of younger people tending to discount input of the experienced worker, as in "you can't possibly understand what I'm talking about". Perhaps this is the natural inverse of the first aspect, though it seems terribly disrespectful. Ultimately both phases must be handled similarly, that is, with grace and patience. This requires a good measure of self-respect and accurate self-assessment. Luckily, these are skills we are better able to acquire as we continue to grow into true maturity.