The intellectual seems to be the major skill group that gifted teachers focus on; there are a lot of other areas where gifted people can stand to focus. There's intellectual maturity, and there's also social and emotional maturity, general horse-sense, physical well-being (though once one hits a certain stage in physical development, one then starts to compare it backwards with younger ages) in flexibility, endurance, coordination, and presence-in-body as well as muscle tone. There's spiritual development. There are so many different varieties of art to explore, both as an active artist and a (relatively) passive appreciator.
There's also the matter of longer lifespans extending the stages of life. Some people act teenage until they're out of their 20s. I went to writing group with a lady who still has all the personal responsibility of a teenager, and she thinks it's no big deal, because Daddy will take care of it all.
After a while, age stops being quite so much of a factor. There are basic levels in skill that every adult should have (change a baby, change a tire, comfort the grieving, cook a meal, et cetera, ad Heinleinium) but after that it's an open playing field for anyone who has either the natural talent to attain mastery without overmuch teaching, or puts the hard work and study into it. For example, there is cook a basic and nutritious meal, then there's cook it well, cook it better than average, cook it at the quality of a decent restaurant, and cook it like a highly trained chef. Likewise, some people have to have a whole pantry full of possibilities in order to produce a meal, where others can whip up amazing things by improvising from what happens to be on hand, even if what happens to be on hand is pretty sad.
The average adult has basic proficiency in the areas crucial to survival, with some sharpening of the skills here and there, and only has a certain amount of skill points to distribute. An above-average adult has a lot more skill points, whether they're all focused on one area of study (as an example of someone gifted in one general field, Britney Spears spent all her skill points on appearance, musical performance, and celebrity with some social; I've never heard any rumors about her secretly being highly intellectual) or distributed across a lot of fields Renaissance-man style, so while someone may be only modestly successful in a lot of areas, that's still a lot of areas.
Then there's the matter of prodigy vs. hard study. So I may be immensely talented in one area just to start out, and I've polished it until I am comparable with people who have spent all their life studying it, but I've now topped out at what I feel I can attain in that area. OK. What next? Or I may have worked really hard at something I want to do, but I'm not as good as someone who's younger than me -- who may have been marvelously proficient and had a huge natural aptitude for it, and had all the right teachers at all the right time, whereas I did not have that aptitude and worked right hard to get to where I'm at.
Right now I'm boggling over the idea that I may be more socially proficient than Dad. I used to think that Dad was nearly totally smooth at every social move he made. Since spending the past several years honing my social skills at my dead-end job, and running into a recent recording of Dad at a university reunion where he completely flubbed his social roll in an altogether typical way, I've realized that I have a better sense of social harmony and public speaking than Dad does. Ten years ago, I would have brushed it off as "Dad's being embarrassing again". Now I know it's because Dad overthinks what he's about to say a long time before he says it, and cannot speak off-the-cuff about things he considers important, so naturally he may not be able to adapt to a different prevailing mood than the one he is prepared for.
(Context is having a midlife crisis, and/or doesn't know what to do with her vacation.)
