FTFY.
I’m 58, and learn faster, and more comprehensively, than I ever did, when I was younger.
I think my grasp of “the big picture,” or a high established baseline, is a big reason for the fast uptake. I don’t need to be told what iterators or allocators are. After having designed hundreds of applications, drivers, tools, APIs, SDKs, libraries, and systems, I know why we do stuff. It isn’t just rote dogma.
This gives me the flexibility to adapt my view of the world to deal with new paradigms and concepts. Also —and this is important— I can “mix and match” my approach. Most of my work, these days, is a chimera. I will use classic patterns, from thirty years ago, and combine them with new “cutting edge” stuff.
That takes flexibility, curiosity, knowledge, and motivation.
Also, teaching is important to learning. Especially teaching smart people. It challenges us to really understand what we’re trying to impart, as we are guaranteed to get challenging questions. When I took martial arts, many moons ago, the “postgraduate” stuff was to become a teacher. The Sifu (you know which art) would insist that students achieving new belts, immediately start training those in earlier belts. By the time you became a blackbelt, you were ready to teach an entire class, unassisted.
BTW: I never became any good at it, but I did learn some cool approaches to stuff.