Urgency/mission is probably the biggest one for me, especially when elements of desperation and impossibility are involved. Working on easy or routine problems

Urgency/mission is probably the biggest one for me, especially when elements of desperation and impossibility are involved. Working on easy or routine problems for 40 hours per week is torture to me. The ratio between my productivity extremes can be most conveniently described as "infinite". If you want to know the root cause of the 10x, 100x, whateverx developer, this is almost certainly it. Someone was likely inspired to work on a super hard thing and just kept going. They don't have some weird genetic defect or unfair educational advantage.