30 years of practice. Why am I not better than this?
How good should you be after 30 years of nearly daily practice? I've been driving about 30 years, and while I don't consider myself a poor driver, I'm certainly not a great driver. I'd say my skills haven't progressed much past the 5 to 10 year mark. Why am I not better?
On a sales trip to experience the excitement of the sports car we were driving, I was allowed to race around a real race track with a professional driver in the passenger seat. I didn't have a death wish, but I was trying to push it to my limit. I was proud of my speed and ability to stick the line. The last exercise was to swap seats and let the pro drive a few laps. I confidently buckled in expecting a trip similar to mine. It wasn't. He went a good 20 to 30 mph faster than I did, and I don't think he was pushing anything. It felt like a Sunday drive for him.
https://thetalentcode.com/ It's not how much you practice as much as how you go about practicing. You need to push just outside of your comfort zone, just beyond the edge of your ability, not too far.
How long have you been at your job? The real question should be have you pushed, continually trained, exposed yourself to new and uncomfortable settings; have you spent time just outside of your ability? Certainly you are better than someone that hasn't started, but are you as good as you could be?
https://gawande.com/better Atul Gawande is pushing, and he's discovered even experts need an outside judge or they will stop developing.
How can you practice in your line of work to be better, always push, add value? It's okay if you don't want to; someone else always will.
I remember teaching high availability for IBM, and I was surprised in the difference between the entitled, wealthy american students and the foreign students. The american students were gone as soon as the lecture was over. The first question asked was, "Where's Hooters?" The foreign students worked every exercise, stayed late, asked questions, tried new setups and troubleshooting. I knew then who would be unemployed soon.