Chief destruction officer: the kid who burned down the house!

I burned down our house. Not metaphorically. An actual bamboo-and-tin-shed home in a small town in northeast India, reduced to a smoking lesson because I wanted to see what fire would do if I helped it along.

I was a teenager. I’d already earned a title around the house — chief destruction officer. My family meant it half as a curse and half as a fact. Because here’s the thing they noticed before I could name it myself: I didn’t break things to break them. I broke them to see what I could make from what was left.

The kid who took everything apart

Most kids like to smash things. I did too. But what set me apart, I think, was the second move — the part that came after the smashing. A broken radio wasn’t trash to me; it was parts. A dead torch was a problem with a hidden answer inside it. I’d take the thing apart, lay the guts out on the floor of my grandmother’s house, and try to build something the manufacturer never intended.

The fire was that instinct with the brakes cut. I was experimenting — what happens if — and the experiment got away from me, the way experiments do when you’re young and the only safety check is your own nerve. The house went up. The lesson stayed.

Because the truth is, I was never really destroying. I was running uncontrolled creation. I just hadn’t learned where the edges were yet.

Creativity and destruction are the same impulse pointed in two directions. The only difference is whether you’ve learned where the edges are.

Three kinds of people watched me build

Here’s the part I keep coming back to, decades later. When I made something out of the broken things — a contraption, a fix, a small invention nobody asked for — people reacted in exactly three ways.

Some encouraged me. They’d light up, ask what it did, tell me to make another. That felt wonderful and taught me almost nothing.

Some ignored or dismissed me. A glance, a shrug, put that away before you hurt yourself. That felt awful and also taught me nothing.

And then a rare few gave me genuine feedback. They’d look at the thing and say: this part is clever, but that part will break the moment you touch it. They told me the truth about my work, which is a completely different gift from telling me the truth about how they felt watching me work.

It took me years to understand that the third group was the only one that mattered. Praise is sugar. Dismissal is noise. Real feedback is the only input that actually changes the next version of the thing you’re making — or the next version of you.

Risk is the tax on making anything new

I left for Chennai at sixteen. Not Bangalore, not Delhi — the popular escape routes — but Chennai, because I wanted a place where nobody knew me as anyone’s son or anyone’s chief destruction officer. I wanted to run my own experiments without supervision. I started small businesses through college, funding my hobbies and launching one venture after another, most of which failed in interesting ways.

That’s the same kid, still taking things apart. The fire taught me that creation carries risk you cannot fully price in advance. You can be careful, you can be smart, and sometimes the tin shed still burns. The question was never how do I avoid the risk — that’s just deciding never to build. The question became how do I make the cost of failing small enough that I can keep trying.

This is the quiet engineering problem under every act of creativity. Burn down a house and the experiment costs you everything. Burn down a prototype, a draft, a weekend side-hustle — and you’ve paid almost nothing for the same lesson. The skill isn’t avoiding destruction. It’s shrinking the blast radius until you can afford to fail constantly.

Why I stopped chasing applause

There’s an idea I keep returning to — the move from effort to effortless. For most of my life, real feedback felt like effort. It was uncomfortable, ego-bruising, something I braced against and had to talk myself into wanting. Praise was the easy default; criticism was the thing I had to force.

The shift came when I finally felt the difference in my own work, not in theory but in the rebuilt thing on the floor in front of me. Praise feels good for a minute and improves nothing. One person telling me precisely where my work fails saves me ten broken versions. Once you’ve watched true feedback compound your work the way encouragement never could, the discomfort stops being a tax you pay and starts being a thing you reach for.

That’s the whole turn — the same arc I trust for any hard new behaviour. It starts as discomfort. You aim what little nerve you have at the few people who’ll tell you the truth. You stay through the stretch where it stings and the better version hasn’t shown up yet. And then, somewhere in the repetition, it goes quiet — you stop needing willpower to seek the hard critique, because you’ve felt what it’s worth. You don’t become a person who tolerates honest feedback. You become a person who seeks it, and it costs you nothing, because by then it’s just who you are.

What I’d tell that kid now

I wouldn’t tell him to stop. I’d tell him to keep the impulse and shrink the stakes. Break the small things, not the load-bearing ones. Run the experiment in a corner where the fire can’t spread. And when you make something — go straight past the people who clap and the people who shrug, and find the rare one who’ll tell you exactly what’s wrong with it. Then thank them, because they just handed you your next version for free.

The destruction was never the problem. Uncontrolled destruction was. The same fire that burns down a house keeps a forge running — the only variable is whether you’ve learned where the edges are.

I’m still learning, honestly. Still co-building, still co-burning the occasional prototype. If you’re wired the same way — wired to take things apart and put them back wrong until they come out right — there’s a whole framework for it in the book, and the tools I actually use are in the resources. You can read more about where all this comes from on my author page.

The kid who burned down the house didn’t grow out of it. He just learned to control the burn.