India, Sept. 17 -- At just 26, Neel Nanda is leading the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind - a position he admits he never expected to land so early in his career. Speaking on The 80,000 Hours Podcast, Nanda described how saying yes to unexpected opportunities and challenging his perfectionist streak helped him step into leadership.

A self-described perfectionist, London-based Nanda said he often hesitated before starting projects, fearing they might fail.

"I often don't want to do things. I'm like, 'This seems risky. This could go wrong,'" he said on the podcast, published Tuesday. To counter that mindset, he pushed himself into an experiment: writing one blog post every day for a month.

That routine not only gave h...