I never understood the advice of to take on impactful work. How does work? The team is assigned units of work and then individuals are usually assigned the tasks. The only way I see it to work is to be on a team that works on impactful projects.
I know this probably doesn't help you now, but I negotiated this as a requirement of my employment. I showed up day one, walked around & engaged about 20 or so people on the floor in what they did over the first few weeks I was there, picked up a few low hanging projects that seemed interesting & then just kept doing whatever the hell I felt like. Was I qualified to do this? No. But, honestly, I wasn't qualified to do anything at the place, anyways.
I mentor all of my junior engineers to do the same, and management really likes it. The rule of the game is you must finish what you start, and you must clearly communicate schedule.
The higher you go, the more vaguely your "tasks" are defined, the more scope you have for interpretation and for choosing subproblems and related problems to dig into and run with.
