You can be 2x smarter and 2x more experienced and have 2x better research skills and 1.25x better administrative skills/support (time management, office layout, etc.) with the net result of 10x effectiveness.
You can be 12.2% better in 20 different but mutually-reinforcing skill areas.
Or, thought of a different way, an ordinary engineer might solve 90 problems easily but get bottlenecked on 10 challenges. You can approach 10x by solving 99 problems easily and only bottlenecking on one. Being an outlier isn't necessarily a matter of one big advantage, but can be about combining a lot of small advantages.
LeBron James, for instance (arguably the greatest basketball player in the world), isn't really 2x better at anything compared to other top basketball players. He can't run twice as fast or jump twice as high. He's just slightly better at everything. Small things can stack to a large degree. Like, how many programmers know the important keyboard shortcuts in their development environment? Obviously it doesn't take a genius to learn keyboard shortcuts, but shaving 5 seconds off operations here and there can have a huge effect when you start thinking about how that multiplies in timescales of weeks or months. (Not that knowing keyboard shortcuts makes you a great developer, just saying, seemingly minor advantages can be huge multipliers)
So yes, similarly minor things can be huge multipliers , like you say.
If you think about it, there's essentially no physical or finite limit to how much you can get done in a day with software (outside of, like, typing speed), so it boils down to how fast and comprehensively you can think. So you might think, well, nobody is 10x smarter than anyone else, and that's probably true, but you could certainly imagine someone that has learned 10x more and has 10x more experience and given the right context can apply that effectively.
I strongly agree with the no-jerks part. I think, short term, you can be a jerk and still be effective, but long term if you're unpleasant you'll develop blind spots because people don't want to deal with you. Once you have significant blind spots, I suspect it's very hard to maintain the 10x pace. There is of course, a strong counter example here, which would be someone like linus torvalds (who is both extremely effective, and, by his own admission, kind of a jerk), but I think while exceptions like that exist they're not the common case.