10x engineering comes from someone who is trying to "be a better developer" actively for many years. Most people who just use the tools to create the product won't ever become that much better. They will just become more knowledgeable. It is the same as any natural skill. You can play piano for years and never really get better. Or you can try specifically to do hard work of improving your technique, theory, and performance ability directly. It will be way more emotionally taxing to do so, but the end result after years of doing this is that you're vastly better than most. Not everyone can even do this. You definitely have to be in a growth mindset and not particularly stressed emotionally at the outset and during the process.
My coworker at Amazon was just making macros nonstop for all these things he wanted to automate within his workflow. He would focus specifically on the hardest problems that we haven't solved first and everything else around it would just spring up together rapidly (I don't even know how he did this). He ended up being heavily involved with AWS and later went to Netflix.