My name is Sami McCabe, and I’m an entrepreholic.

I recently left Clarity, the business I founded and built over the past decade.

As most entrepreneurs will testify, starting and leading a business to any meaningful scale (Clarity was ~150 FTEs globally when I departed) is a rollercoaster.

The highs are extremely high, and the lows can be desperately low.

So low, in fact, that at various points over the years I actively hated myself for choosing to pursue an entrepreneurial path and put myself (and, by extension, my family) through such turmoil.

So why, just days after inking my exit from Clarity, am I itching to get to work on my next venture? What’s driving me to dust myself off and put myself through it all again?

Objectively, given the toil entrepreneurship takes on one’s health and relationships, my urgent sense of wanting to jump back into the fire and my total lack of regard for the downsides, feels like the self-destructive behaviour of an addict.

I’m increasingly persuaded that the urge comes from a deep human need to be creative.

And, for me, starting and building a business is a quintessentially creative endeavour — as creative, in my view, as poetry, or sculpture, or woodworking, or songwriting.

What’s more creative than turning a half-formed, back-of-the-envelope idea into a living, breathing organism that grows, evolves and, ultimately, lives and thrives independently of its originator?

It’s a thrilling act of creation.

Creativity sits at the apex of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In his framing of it, creative expression is crucial to self-actualisation.

In more prosaic terms, Maslow argued that creative humans were happy humans — like secure, content children open to new experiences.

This resonates with me: I want to feel like a ‘secure, content’ child. I think on some level we all do.

And if being creative is the key to unlock that way of being, that way of experiencing life and interacting with the world, then it feels like my only option is to start another business.

For better or worse, in lieu of any other artistic talent or inclination, it turns out that entrepreneurship is the only tool I have to satisfy my human need for creative expression.

In his excellent book Creative Calling the photographer Chase Jarvis suggested that creativity is ‘as important to our well-being as exercise or nutrition’.

This is hyperbolic of course, but on some level I get it: for me, entrepreneurship isn’t so much an addiction, it’s a necessity.