A new way of learning
At some point, you find you've become become 'senior'. No advance notice is sent of this and it does not figure on any meeting agendas. When someone introduces me as 'highly experienced', I look over my shoulder to see who they are really talking about.
As seniority hits, I'm finding myself learning more and more from those younger than me. I'm older than most people in my personal and professional eco-systems of course, but that's only part of it.
As a parent of teenage kids, there's inevitably a lot more they know about popular culture. I also have to learn stuff with them in order to help them with their school work.
One of my daughters tells me about a collaboration between Taylor Swift and The National - and educates me about music she likes and how it connects to music I like. Pretty cool.
Books by young constitutional scholars - Rohit De, Madhav Khosla, Gautam Bhatia, amongst others, reveal approaches to the tools of my own trade that better inform my thinking.
A younger colleague teaches me how to search for papers on Google Scholar and do proper academic citations.
Another young colleague shows me how to use software for collaborative research.
Someone I helped train gives me a viewpoint on an issue I'm grappling with and I receive an elegant explanation.
I'm more open to learning from younger generations than I even have been, and I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps because I'm finally more confident in my own body of knowledge and experience, I'm also more comfortable with receiving that of others. Maybe it helps that that I'm not practicing law every day, where the culture dictates that you can never be seen without the right answer.
In any event, it's great fun.