This is fine for a certain class of work, and disastrous when applied to another class of work.

To use an analogy a physician's assistant[1] doing brain surgery could be a big problem. if you need the latter. Also, you're probably overpaying if you hire the latter to administer Tylenol ...

[1]: exclude the special class of surgical PAs xD

Spoiler alert: most of the 2.7 million developers in the US aren’t “solving hard problems”. I interact with the people who are writing the services for the largest cloud provider. When I meet them for lunch, they are seldomly talking about work.

For awhile, I was working with the service teams involved with the various AI services trying to publish an open source demo around their services. When we left for lunch we were talking about travel, cars, our families, places to eat, etc.

Most of the millions of plumbers in the US are not solving plumbing puzzles, they're ensuring that plumbing systems work.

I bet the well adjusted ones don’t talk about plumbing in every sentence.

There is so much more to life than technology - this is coming from someone who did hobby programming in assembly language on four different processors by the time I graduated - in 1996.

I sincerely doubt the 10x brain surgeon talks only about brain surgery in their downtime. I would assert that a true 10x person is smart enough to maintain good work-life balance.

There is an infinite pool work you can do. Smart, real 10x’ers understand what is a priority and are smart enough to pack their shit at the end of the day, go home and do nothing at all with their work.

Maybe 10x are just people whose hobby overlaps with work?