I never cared all that much about analytics. I just happened to stumble on it and had a moderate interest in automating tedious stuff in Excel.

Turns out this was valuable to my company and government clients, so I was able to use these skills to become a 1099.

But because I am not super interested, I don't care to keep improving my skills beyond necessity.

The problem is, there are people (many of whom are younger) who are SUPER interested in this stuff! They just live and breathe it.

The thing is they're also cheaper too, so in a head to head competition on technical skills, a potential client would and should choose these younger technical guys to work with it over me, an "old" dude at 36.

So should I motivate myself to master the latest data engineering and analysis techniques?

Naw. You can't motivate yourself to do stuff you don't intrinsically want to do.

So instead, I'm focusing on getting better at understanding client problems, building relationships, and as a longer term project, growing a business.

If you're like me and are not interesting in increasing your technical competence forever, you should come up with something else to do that that can make you valuable on the 1099 market (or whatever is you choose to do).

If you're a W2 employee, the default path is management, but most people aren't naturally interested in that either.

Be a little thoughtful about what you want to do once you start "aging out" of technical work. Getting ahead on your own terms is better than falling behind someone else's.