Should you start a business? How to tell wanting from needing

Here is the short answer. You should start a business when your reason is closer to a need than a want, and you can tell the difference by listening to yourself talk about it. Wants are the things you would like to move toward. Needs are the things you cannot keep living with. Wants fade the first time a customer refuses to pay and the mortgage is due on Friday. Needs get you up at five in the morning to work before your day job starts.

Ask a hundred people why they want to start a business and ninety will give you a version of the same handful of answers: more freedom, more money, being their own boss, an idea they think could work. These reasons make sense, and they are probably true for most people who eventually start something, but on their own they are nowhere near strong enough to carry you through what happens when you actually try to build a business from nothing.

What a need actually feels like

I left school at sixteen. Rang my father, told him I was done, told him I was going to become a builder. There was a pause. He said, "Are you sure?" I said I was sure. He said, "Alright, I'll make some calls."

What I could not have explained to him at sixteen, because I did not have the words for it, was that I detested dependency with every part of my being. I could not stand the idea of relying on other people for my survival. That feeling was strong enough to get me through sixty-hour weeks in trenches, hands that needed rebandaging four times a day, and a body that went from sixty kilos to eighty in a single year because it had to adapt or I would not have survived the job.

That was my reason. Yours will be different, but it needs to be that strong, because the early years will test it.

The pattern shows up in the people who last

Phil Knight built Nike from a fifty-dollar loan into a company worth more than a hundred billion dollars. Read his memoir and what comes through is an inability to accept the conventional path everyone around him was following. He worked as an accountant for six years and built Nike on the side the whole time, because he could not stop. Sara Blakely built Spanx from nothing into a billion-dollar company, and the product idea came later. What came first was a conviction, built over years of selling fax machines door to door, that she was capable of creating something even though nobody around her seemed to believe it. In both cases the engine was the thing they refused to accept, and the product was the vehicle.

A test you can run tonight

Record yourself talking about why you want to start a business. Two or three minutes on your phone is enough. Then listen back and pay attention to what you actually say.

• If you hear yourself talking about what would be nice, what you hope for, what could be good, those are wants.
• If you hear yourself talking about what you cannot keep doing, what makes you feel trapped, what you refuse to accept any longer, those are closer to needs.

What you are looking for is something nearer to need than want. That is different from desperation, which leads to bad decisions. It is a settled conviction that your current situation is unacceptable and that you are willing to work for years, if necessary, to change it.

If the test says you are not ready

Some people run this exercise and discover their motivation is weaker than they thought. That does not mean you should never start a business. It means you are not ready to start one right now, and knowing that is valuable, because it saves you from starting something you are likely to abandon when it gets hard.

Motivation changes. A bad boss, a redundancy, a growing frustration with the gap between what you can do and what you are allowed to do. You will know when it shifts from wanting to needing, and understanding what readiness looks like puts you in a stronger position when that moment arrives.

Matthew Horncastle started Williams Corporation at 19, on the tools. Fourteen years later it is one of New Zealand's largest residential developers, with more than 650 homes settled and over half a billion dollars of property delivered. Williams Academy is the course library he wishes had existed when he was twenty-three.