the popular claim is 10X better than average. Not 10X better then suck. And definitely not 10X better than a total newbie at the one thing you've worked on your entire career.

Yeah a (slightly) better sporting analogy might be chess. Like chess, programming is a game of knowledge and forethought, where intelligence is an asset, but far from sufficient to elevate you without a ton of practice. However unlike chess, there is no scope or rigid definition of programming, it is as if there were as many pieces with different rules as there are possible positions on a chessboard, and furthermore that the rules of the pieces are made up themselves of subpieces all of which are programmable, and that you can essentially change everything from the behavior of the squares up to the overarching rules.

Now in chess, as in programming, there are clearly some individuals who excel by orders of magnitude over beginners and even average competent players. But because of the vast scope of possibility, programming "grandmasters" will do things that no one else could have even thought of in one domain, while in unfamiliar domains they might require a good deal of study before they surpass the average journeyman practitioner.

Meh, analogies suck.

It's more about taking an analogy where you compare a normal distribution to something that isn't a normal distribution.

Physical capabilities of organisms (e.g., strength, speed, jumping height, etc.) tend to fall into normal distributions.

Knowledge work where you can take advantage of powerful (mental | software) abstractions don't tend to fall into normal distributions, as previous work can make a bottleneck disappear, leaving you with more mental bandwidth for other concerns, which quickly expands your capabilities.

I'm assuming we're talking about output measured in the real world. At the forth standard deviation you might be 1 in a million, but you're still not outperforming an average person by 10X.