Depends. If you look up to - John Carmack, Jeff Dean, Jon Skeet (a lot of more names), and keep learning, growing and outpacing yourself from yday then sky is the limit.
Most of the recent psychologists who study expert performers all tend to agree that "genius level" just like "innate talent" is a cognitive distortion and discredits the amount of actual effort, practice, and honing of their craft these individuals put into it.
We are all born with the same brain* (edit: see the ted talk on the "After 83,000 brain scans"). Some of us just aren't born in the right environment to curate it and never learn the best ways to use it ("learning how to learn") given the current dominant socio-economic factors. It gets harder as you get older not because of age but because your anxieties, fears, and distortions become more reinforced, so breaking down those thought patterns becomes harder
*: I mean this more or less, not literal. To clarify, I am speaking more specifically to neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. Maybe some things come easier for other people out of the gate, but this wasn't because of some "innate" talent, but rather some factor of their development, both internal and external, provided the acuity and propensity towards excelling that specific thing, but if you molded another brain from scratch this same way, you would more or less get the same result.
edit: With the TED video,I was again referring to the take away: "You are not stuck with the brain you have, you can make it better." So if you were "never born with the ability to be good at math" this is a distortion, just as much as "I am only mediocre at math and will never be great at math" is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esPRsT-lmw8&t=599s
Besides this, I think, focus among other things also plays a big part in your abilities. If I am checking FB every 5 mins then I will never be able to match the learning abilities of someone who does not even care what is happening around him while he is learning.
I'm in my early 40s. One of the most difficult things I'm wrestling with is being typecast, people forming a rigid perception of what my interests and skillsets are. What I'm actually working on, interested in, and doing are often not inline with the schema people have in their head about "who I am." I feel this force of expectations pressing in, good and bad. To some extent, you can only make the best of the opportunities you have, and the opportunities that are thrown my way are all what people expect me to be doing, regardless of what I think of it. I have a job, but the politics and management are horrible, and I feel myself being boxed in by social dynamics and cultural factors. And then the effects of these politics are identified as being about me, rather than my situation, and it becomes kind of a vicious negative circle.
My broader point in response to what you're saying is that I've grown deeply suspicious of claims to genius. Sure, there are brilliant people out there, and hardworking people, but there's also a huge element of luck or circumstance. I've seen this firsthand with people at the top of my field I am close to, very famous people, who had huge changes of fortune due to circumstances changing. They sometimes could reverse course, but only because they had enjoyed good circumstances earlier, and people could say "oh, X was brilliant--they just went through a rough patch." The people who got those rough patches early in their careers aren't afforded the same second chances, and are written off.
There are far more brilliant, hardworking people than we give credit to. Most of the advances in our society are not due to single brilliant individuals, but due to incremental improvements day after day, by people who we never learn about. The politics of credit are soul-crushing when you see it up close.
To me the single most pernicious problem with ageism is the stereotype that you are incapable of changing or learning something else. We want to put people into boxes, boxes based on vocation, and ability, and personality, and the older someone gets the more of a box we want to put them in. For people who have happened to land in the right places at the right time, aging can be a wonderful accumulation of security. But for the rest of us, it feels like being punished for your environment, or punished for the stereotype others have of you--it's as if you're being held to account for others' perceptions of you. To some extent, that is a valid stereotype, but to some extent it is not.
I feel more vulnerable now than any point in my life, because I want more than anything to leave, to change, to improve my life and that of my family, but so far it seems impossible without making things worse. When I was 20, people seemed willing to believe I could do anything; now it seems people are skeptical of me doing anything different from what I've done.
> We are all born with the same brain (see the ted talk on the "After 83,000 brain scans"). Some of us just aren't born in the right environment to curate it and never learn the best ways to use it
That's blatantly untrue, and we have shitloads of twin and adoption studies to prove it.
