I and my son both did/do some advanced things early, but differently. I was a quite late talker, but then sprung into advanced reading soon after (I went from my first book I taught myself to read, "Little Bear" by Maurice Sendak, to reading "Gulliver's Travels" within months).
My son was very verbal early on and learned to read early, but his reading has sort of plateaued as he has achieved the ability to read what he wants-- which is mostly comic books these days-- and has turned to other interests. Harry Potter is about as far as he can go reading-wise without risking a lot of frustration, and he doesn't seem to be the type to rush to college-age textbooks so far, though he is interested a lot in science and how things work in general.
I had good mechanical problem-solving skills as a kid, but my son is more advanced there. He also has more advanced general problem-solving skills, which are for instance displayed when we play games. He can beat adults (including me and my quite smart wife) at a lot of games we play. He's a demon at Risk-- very hard to beat unless we gang up to stave off disaster. He plays a credible game of chess after little instruction, whereas I know it took me much to pick up that game.
The differences I see in us are interesting. I think that a lot of them are due to environment-- for instance I didn't play nearly as many different types of games, or as often, when I was a kid. I think he would beat the five-year-old me handily in a number of areas, though I was probably more single-minded than him in my focus on a few areas, and probably less easy to distract in general.
My second son is 14 months old and verbally delayed, like me. He has shown some early puzzle-solving abilities that roughly align with some things I learned from my mother about myself. Whether he will be gifted within one definition or another remains to be seen. We were quite worried until I remembered my own delay, and until the doctor told us that second children with hyper-verbal older siblings are more likely to show verbal delays. He's quite physical and very, very determined, again like I was.
