I think suevv hit on a key issue about being able to choose your environment. If I understand the theory, so much of EF weakness (and ADD impacts) relate to the inability to pay proper attention to tasks which are not intrinsically motivating (which is of course what makes these gaps look so terribly volitional, but that's another rant).
Kids have so little ability to choose and shape their environment. As adults, many of us find jobs that draw on our strengths and minimize the destruction caused by our weaknesses. We find partners who can handle the tasks we can't. When we don't.... well, then you have blackcat's example - and, as a for instance, the vast number of other Americans who can't dig themselves out of unmanageable debt loads. I would speculate that gifted adults may have a distinct advantage over most low-EF people, in often having access to a much wider array of career choices and far more ability to mould our environments to meet our own particular needs.
Warning: soapbox..... This is also why I get so frustrated by teachers and family members who constantly dismiss DS's learning needs by insisting that "He MUST learn to get along in the real world." Well, actually, mostly, no. I am quite confident that the moment he is allowed to escape his public school box, he will put himself into a reality of his own choosing - and it will NOT involve spending all day every day trapped in a room with people with whom he has no shared interests, listening to a one-way drone of highly linear, repetitive, shallow and slow-moving information about things he knew years ago and don't interest him even vaguely. Your reality, lady, not his.
Unfortunately, if he spends all his time learning to cope with *their* reality, he will be utterly unprepared to take advantage of eventual opportunities to create his own - opportunities that require him to still be excited about learning, to see joy in math, to be able to persevere in hard problems and not collapse with anxiety and avoid everything that isn't easy.... All the stuff I beg and beg them to allow him to be able to do, but which I'm always told are special treatment that would keep him from "learning to get along in the real world."
