I'm sure I can find problems that I can solve quickly and amaze people. Being able to pick your own problems makes for a bad metric for identifying 10x programmers.
Norvig has written a ton of kick ass programs in his career that are concise, efficient, and correct, in much less time than most programmers would require.
Furthermore, even picking your own problems can be a way to achieve > 10x productivity, as identifying useful problems to solve is also a crucial skill.
I attended a talk given by Norvig, where he frankly admitted Google picked markets to enter where they could get good quality data to train their machine learning models on (this was many years ago). Maybe lesser developers wouldn't have that insight.
Exactly. Norvig's skill set happens to be of the upscale variety, but similar "10x" knowledge+practice effects exist in more pedestrian domains as well.
Compared to my current self, my teenage self was a 10x PHP programmer. I'm absolutely sure that it would take years for me to get back to being even remotely good at PHP-interleaved-with-HTML style coding.
https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
How many developers do you know that would bang out a spelling corrector on a single plane flight, in half a page of code?
It's a question of knowing the algorithms of tools that make things possible that other developers might not even consider, and how to express those ideas cleanly and concisely, evaluate your solution, and iterate and improve quickly.
And then consider the quality of his documentation and considerations for improvement and future work.