Pattern Matching. People naturally pattern match a problem to a known solution. And as you get older, your mental repository of seen patterns gets quite large

Pattern Matching. People naturally pattern match a problem to a known solution. And as you get older, your mental repository of seen patterns gets quite large. The problem with this is, it’s difficult to come up with an innovative solution if you’ve already seen a prior pattern for the problem you’re solving. And as such, you become less “innovative”. The flip side to this is, it’s common for someone earlier in their career to “reinvent the wheel”, because they hadn’t seen a pattern yet for the problem they are solving. Sometimes though, they will reinvent it in an innovative way.