It's an old Irish proverb that sense comes with age (tagann ciall le h-aois). However, I was reminded of that recently in training where I observed participants struggling with an ice-breaker problem-solving exercise but being very frustrated by not being able to see the data put in front of them in another way. It reminded me that as we grow older we tend to stick to the first obvious solution we can think of and hang onto it like grim death. When we were young we were better at generating alternatives. Think about it.