Some weak evidence of why "exceptional abilities" is not a bad idea, even if gimmiky, is that performance "at the extreme" is highly correlated. So that the people who tend, eg., to be concert pianists, tend also to be very accomplished artists, and the like.

So if you're hitting (a verifiable) top 0-0.5% in some field, there's a reasonable bias towards assuming a high general competence.

I did once hit 0.5 percentile in a multinational PHP exam in my teenage years however I did have a second window open with an interpreter running for the most fringe questions. -- who knows what that means.