After going back to college at the age of 29 to obtain my CS degree, I finally unlocked my key to learning. I am not sure if this is going to work for you. In

After going back to college at the age of 29 to obtain my CS degree, I finally unlocked my key to learning. I am not sure if this is going to work for you. In the last few years I have learned about construction/building codes, cars/engines, continued expanding my programming knowledge and also smaller things that come up as I exist, including investing/personal finance. The depth of the knowledge in those areas depends on the problem. My key to learning is: quickly applying what I learn or learn to solve a problem I have. The solving a problem I already have supercharges my learning capabilities and puts my brain into overdrive. I often get fixated on a problem and my life start revolving around figuring it out. Obviously, some things are just not reasonable. I gave up on learning some things and just paid to have it done, but usually like to at least make an attempt. A direct example to your question, when I was younger I enjoyed wrenching on cars. I bought a car and at some point after the warranty was over I realized the engine was toast. I did not have the means to pay someone to just build a complete engine for me. I ended up doing research and seeking advice. In the end I was able to tear the whole engine apart, contract out the machining of the engine block and was able to assemble everything mostly by myself. This took hours of just learning everything. What parts to use, which type of metal is best for pistons in my application. I learned so much that I did a presentation on a turbo combustion engine in school. Programming example, I heard and I even read what dependency injection is. However, I would not be able to really explain it to someone else at that point. Then, I started to do more testing on my code, and it became clear some things were extremely hard to test without DI. CI/CD, same thing I knew about it but I was working as a solo dev and on non-business-critical software. Then, as I started working on bigger projects which ran a business I quickly realized I needed a CI/CD pipeline to track releases and changes. I kept running into headaches without it. Now, I could explain in depth, provide examples of how it really can benefit a business especially when application breaking bugs are discovered. For me confidence comes from REALLY knowing things and understanding the "WHY" I am doing this thing. Plus, sometimes someone may ask you a question you don't know an answer to, it is okay to say you are unfamiliar with something. Then, go look up after. This is how you find gaps in your knowledge. In the end you can't know everything. To have a good life one must learn until they die as things change.