Being open to new experiences, in my opinion, is much more a matter of the people you surround yourself with, than with physiology. Sure, your brain may change a little bit in your 20s and not so much in your 30s, but if you have the right friends, perhaps some younger friends, they will drag you into new things.
I have felt that palpably running my own company for the last 5 years. In the first few years, it was just my wife and I doing everything, writing the code and running the business. As we started to make enough money that we could hire people, I started to notice how set in our ways we became.
Since we had started writing iPhone apps near the beginning of the mobile revolution, our code was written to suit older devices. In places, we did things for performance reasons so our apps would work well on old phones. Also, we never adopted ARC, because that's just not how we did it. But as we started to hire people, our engineers pushed us to change our old ways, and as a result, our code became much better.
So, I say - don't fear the reaper. Just find some young friends (or employees). I turned 30 this year, so I have a few gray hairs, but working with people in their 20s really has changed my ideas on the right way to do things, and given me perspective on my own life.
One thanksgiving I showed an 80 year old how to put a candle out with a hand gesture. He was really into it an in his words there are far fewer really new things at 80 than you might think. Which struck me as the core of a lot of ageism, when your young doing just about anything is a solid learning environment, but eventually it becomes tough to continue to develop new skills. Your job becomes all about leveraging what you already know not expanding you into new areas the same for your social circle and if your not careful hobby's.
reading this i thought you might be 40+ and was suprised you write "turned 30 this year".
You make yourself much older than you are..i will turn 30 too in 2 months but i have never felt to need to "surround myself with younger people in their 20s"..Many of my friends are late 20s, mid 20s or even early 20s, still nobody feels that anyone of the other is "old" or "young", its just not much of a difference to be noticed anyway.
I have felt that palpably running my own company for the last 5 years. In the first few years, it was just my wife and I doing everything, writing the code and running the business. As we started to make enough money that we could hire people, I started to notice how set in our ways we became.
Since we had started writing iPhone apps near the beginning of the mobile revolution, our code was written to suit older devices. In places, we did things for performance reasons so our apps would work well on old phones. Also, we never adopted ARC, because that's just not how we did it. But as we started to hire people, our engineers pushed us to change our old ways, and as a result, our code became much better.
So, I say - don't fear the reaper. Just find some young friends (or employees). I turned 30 this year, so I have a few gray hairs, but working with people in their 20s really has changed my ideas on the right way to do things, and given me perspective on my own life.