Here's the deal: I've been programming off and on for most of my life (currently in my 40s). While I've created a few basic web sites for money, it has mainly been a hobby for me, and one I greatly enjoy. I've written simple 2D video games (C++), simple chatbots (Python), quiz-generating systems(JS-PHP-MySQL), etc., so I'm not totally clueless about this stuff. However, there seems to be a very real, and quite frankly disappointing <i>limit</i> to what my brain is able to do. For example, I have recently joined HackerRank, and have been working on several of the problems. I don't know what it is, but for some reason even some of the problems marked <i>easy</i> are incredibly hard for me to figure out. While I've successfully answered the majority of the problems I've attempted there, there are some that, based on the number of successful submissions and the rank of <i>easy</i> MUST be simple and yet I've spent sometimes 2 hours on those and cannot produce a program that passes all the tests. That's very discouraging because I want to become a better programmer but I feel I may have reached the limit of what my brain can do. Has anyone experienced anything like this? If so, were you able to figure it out and improve your problem-solving skill set? Thanks for any advice you could offer!