When I was 18, I thought my father was pretty dumb. After a while when I got to be 21, I was amazed to find out how much he’d learned in three years.

The quip captures a common rite of passage: adolescence often mistakes growing independence for superior judgment, leading to impatience with parental authority. The punchline—crediting the father with having “learned” so much in three years—ironically reverses the truth. What changed was the speaker’s perspective, maturity, and ability to recognize experience and care that previously felt like ignorance or obstruction. The line functions as a compact meditation on humility and delayed appreciation, suggesting that wisdom is sometimes less about acquiring new facts than about learning to see familiar people more accurately.