I, too, have had that kind of experience. Unlike you, I actually matriculated college, and was still one of the bigger fish. (It was a little college.) I'm wondering if you and I actually learn as quickly and as easily as we think we do. Or, is it that we have chosen not to continuously challenge ourselves?

I say this because of two things:

1. Because I now work with stvn, I've been drawn into the P6 metamodel discussions. There's a lot of really really smart people on the P6L list. These guys are so smart it's scary. Yet, I can't help thinking that the smartest ones on the list are the ones who refuse to be locked into an idea, subject everything to a sniff test, and are insatiable learners. Their brilliance, if anything, is in finding relationships between unconnected pieces of knowledge. (Read up on how Larry built Perl 1.0 to see what I'm talking about. Plus, why hasn't Larry ever given a State of the Onion that was actually on programming?)
2. My wife and her parents don't have college degrees. Yet, these are the things they are able to do that I can't, even though they're just engineering or optimization problems:
   • My wife can feed and clothe a family of 7 (including an infant and a toddler) on $200/week. (optimization)
   • My father-in-law can build cars. (engineering)
   • My mother-in-law taught herself how to program and use databases (through CrystalReports) while being a secretary.

As I approach 30 in a few weeks, I'm starting to realize that what you know, while important, is less important than either what you do with it or what you did to get that knowledge. It also doesn't hurt to have a good respect for the other guy. (Read Martin Buber's I and Thou for a good grasp of the difference between a personalized Other and an objectified Other. Then, cross-reference that with http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/monkeysphere.html.)