We all want to be great. But great ideas don’t come about when you are eagerly waiting for them to. You have to go about doing your work, attacking problems that are interesting and that you can actually think of and are qualified to do, and then in the course of doing your work generally things come to place

It’s sort of like waiting for inspiration to hit to start writing. That’s a recipe for disaster. You have to write crappy paragraphs anyway, look at references, read the references, edit crappy paragraphs, and then when the inspiration does hit, you milk it for all it’s worth. But even if it doesn’t, you will still have many meticulously edited paragraphs.

I think there is a quote somewhere to the effect “You don’t wait for inspiration to start doing, you do to get inspiration.” (paraphrased)

And I don’t think one can truly assess which papers will be well-liked and well-cited. I mean, yes, a paper in Nature/Science will be cited, but I have a Journal of Applied Physics (impact factor below 3) paper that gets as many citations per year as my Nature paper. It was simply a good, solid paper on a topic people cared about and appeared at the right time. It was one of the “boring” projects.

And yes, no publications for years = professional suicide. I know people will forgive you for the first year on the tenure track, but not after that.