10X programmers are what they are simply because they've already seen a similar problem before. The longer you're at the game, the more exposure you've had the bigger the chance that you'll be 10X as good at something as somebody else.

Personally I don't think the 10X moniker is very useful. Imagine we'd be calling the marathon runners of the world 10X people. They may be a bit better at task 'X' (running a marathon) but they may suck at a variety of other tasks.

In the end it's all the 0.5 to 9.5 programmers that get the bulk of all the work done, and yet, everybody wants to hire only the 10X guys/girls and the not-yet-10X guys/girls are left to feel miserable because they're somehow inadequate.

If you want to go to the opera: practice, practice, practice. And then you too will be a '10X programmer' at some point in your life, the real question is whether or not you'll still enjoy it as much as when you did when everything was new and you were learning all the time.

One thing that I have noticed that makes a huge difference in your abilities: try to not be a single-technology programmer. If you branch out into at least two or three other sub-fields of programming (languages, theory) then you'll become a much better programmer in a hurry.