Thanks for this! I've really found it helpful.

I suppose part of my confusion came from reading in Eyesenck about the alarmingly large number of geniuses that scored as prodigies, but over a longitudinal study, ended up living unhappy lives in janitor-level jobs. Eyesenck deals with this by discussing correlations between intelligence and some more negative personality traits, but I would have expected great enough intelligence to invent routines to compensate for that. In any case, I think this points to my further being confused about how 'success' was being defined.

I'm also puzzled at the apparent disconnect between solving problems in one's own life and solving problems on paper.