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Maybe it was faster for truly smart people to get a Ph.D. back in the day. My father had his Ph.D. in computer science by the time he was 21. I tried to take one masters-level course when I was 22 and they laughed at me.

I think it is the education systems' fault, rather than your own.

I vividly remember feeling this way too (not about Wolfram, but about similar things) when I was 23. In my experience, a benefit of getting older has been that this sort of concern gradually fades. Eventually, you affectionately wonder how you ever could have let it matter to you so much.

i guess you wouldn't like to hear that his first quantum physics publication was as a teenager? i read somewhere that when Feynman first met SW, he said he was amazing.