I definitely agree. I think people forget that they can learn things, or they get caught up in this "too old to learn" kind of trap, or at least "too old to learn anything serious."
I've always dug computers, but hadn't done anything with programming until I was 26 or so (I'm 31 now). A friend of mine had gotten a degree in journalism, and then just decided he wanted to program instead. He ended up getting a full time gig doing it. I thought, "hey, that looks cool, why not" and started teaching myself, as well. Now I have a full time gig doing full stack c# dev and I love it. It's not because I'm some kind of genius or a computer whiz. It friggin sucks trying to learn new concepts sometimes. Eventually I just realized I'm training a really effective neural network. If I fire enough information and different ways of looking at the concept through my brain matter, and make sure I understand the underlying principles, eventually it'll start making sense; soon enough it'll feel like something I always knew.
It made me feel a lot more comfortable with life. It's not even because suddenly I have a marketable skill, which is super nice, but more because I feel like I could learn just about whatever I want tomorrow if I needed to. It's really liberating.
I've always dug computers, but hadn't done anything with programming until I was 26 or so (I'm 31 now). A friend of mine had gotten a degree in journalism, and then just decided he wanted to program instead. He ended up getting a full time gig doing it. I thought, "hey, that looks cool, why not" and started teaching myself, as well. Now I have a full time gig doing full stack c# dev and I love it. It's not because I'm some kind of genius or a computer whiz. It friggin sucks trying to learn new concepts sometimes. Eventually I just realized I'm training a really effective neural network. If I fire enough information and different ways of looking at the concept through my brain matter, and make sure I understand the underlying principles, eventually it'll start making sense; soon enough it'll feel like something I always knew.
It made me feel a lot more comfortable with life. It's not even because suddenly I have a marketable skill, which is super nice, but more because I feel like I could learn just about whatever I want tomorrow if I needed to. It's really liberating.