Yup. I'm going with the "filtering" theory as per the above comments, but with a twist. Getting older and wiser is a bit like Bill Hicks' definition of getting

Yup. I'm going with the "filtering" theory as per the above comments, but with a twist. Getting older and wiser is a bit like Bill Hicks' definition of getting high: "When you're high, you can do everything you normally do just as well - you just realize that it's not worth the fucking effort." At 20 I'd stay up for 72 hours very badly writing a full featured text editor in the one language I knew, C. That giddy, naive excitement was the engine. Most of my ideas were stupid. I had no measure of my abilities or time, and so optimistically threw myself into projects. At 35 I had a choice of more than 10 programming languages I knew well, but used someone else's libraries to hack what I needed together in Perl in an hour. That was probably "peak hacker". By 40 I figured out I could just customise Emacs with a line of elisp. At 50 I figured: if it's not already an obvious feature or extension then I'm probably misunderstanding what I think I want. Wisdom frees up time and effort to focus on innovations which are grander/complex, happen on a slower timescale, need more help and collaboration with others, require more reflective thought, and have to be matched to my known abilities and time.