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Comment by LanceH | Hacker News Reader

I'm mid 40's now. It is significantly different than when I was 20 or younger.

It was like I had more horsepower back then. I could sit down and do 200 vocabulary words 90% retention after a single pass. I'm nowhere close now.

On the other hand, I can organize my attack on learning something so much better than I could before.

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I'm the exact opposite. Back in my 20s I was surrounded by countless distractions: bar-hopping, parties, girls, video games, you name it. Sitting down and applying myself to learning something took tremendous effort.

Now that I'm in my 30s though, I have way more focus. I can easily sit down and work on a project for hours at a time. On top of that, I have way more motivation, because I have a very good idea of what I want in life and I know how to get there.

Same, in fact I dropped out of college after the first two years (started immediately after high school). I took a few years off and then went back only to find that I was able to learn things much easier, and with less distraction that I had at a younger age.

As someone who's still in the "dropped out" phase, this is tremendously encouraging. I can tell that I am improving in my concentration, discipline, catching myself procrastinating etc, but sometimes I worry that it's too slow and that I'll never develop to the point where I'll be able to complete a degree.

I'm there to man. Just got into my 30's and things seem clearer now to me.

40s ditto.

I don't know about you but I also don't feel like I have that much time like when I was 20, so I at least try to squander less of it

Retention is something you can train. In your teens you used to train your retention, so it was significantly better. After becoming an adult you spend much less time learning, and the ability to remember things after the first pass has declined.

I gurantee that if you train your memory daily, you will get the same retention as you used to.

> I could sit down and do 200 vocabulary words 90% retention after a single pass. I'm nowhere close now.

Would be interesting to quantify such changes, but my guess would be that the changes are smaller than expected or felt.

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