Outstanding performance in adult products is a scanty situation in contrast with academic expectations of achievement that provide to a large population with an extreme competence potential. The mismatch between the accomplishment expected and the eventual results has been explained in terms of sound differences in cognitive resources involved in academical activities-mainly oriented to information acquisition-and professional activities, that focus on production and innovation. For instance Sternberg stresses the role of practical intelligence and expert knowledge in local processing systems outside academical performance. Goleman and Gardner claim that emotional intelligence and creativity are at the core of intellectual resources when original products are expected. But, even expanding the cognitive profile explanation to include processes and knowledge that were neglected in those intelligence theories oriented to school achievement, some fundamental questions are still out of the model. A comprehensive framework must include a modulation that results in high quality adult outcomes. In one hand the complexity of the product (e.g. innovation in painting) is not only a matter of accumulating skills, it rather demands a full integration of abilities with a deep representation of information. In the other, adult products capitalize a whole life-span investment cycle that permits optimal mental models and to make use of the own intellectual resources in a powerful manner. Biographical accounts support this kind of complementary analysis. Even if this retrospective data may induce to a some biases due to interpretation, they also provide objective data that warrants that the necessary intellectual abilities were present. Having a moderately wide range of biographies allows to compare them in order to assess similarities and discrepancies, to test some hypotheses about the effects of formal education, cycles of production and so on. This work concerns a preliminary analysis of 120 biographical accounts of people that have produced significant outcomes in different fields (science, literature, architecture, painting, cinema and industry) and producing the largest part of the outcomes in the 20th century. The sampling criterium was being cited in three independent biographical indexes (Chambers, British Encyclopaedia and Oxford University Press). Complementary data were collected, using historical and biographical monographs and files form different sources and archives. This information was systematically stored in a database filling a set of predetermined categories (family status and influences, educational fulfilment, jobs, social facilities, life events, and a detailed chronography of products). First basic descriptive analysis has been carried out showing some interesting hints: in the basic educational period (e.g. up to graduate level) bright school performance is present in only a third of the sample. The largest segment of the sample had chosen a non conventional field of activity and had been influenced by relevant individuals. And a third interesting clue refers to two different patterns of productive cycles: a single-cycle with an early rise of product quality, followed by a plateau and an eventual fall in productivity, and a multiple-cycle pattern in which the raise and plateau phases were followed by a reorganization period leading to a more complex or sophisticated progression, all life long. In global terms, these results suggest that performance based in an academical foundation drives to a very specialized field of expertise in which high productivity has a single or just a few summit points. On the contrary, when academical results are good, but not so bright, the learning period is stretched along the whole life-span, acquiring information from many sources allowing multiple cycles of productivity and wider fields of expertise.