Entrepreneurship is a game of risk assumption and management. So, come to know your  score. Rutgers has posted a great quiz to help.

Learning Outcome:

In this exercise, students develop an understanding of their willingness or reluctance to take educated risks.

Answer the following questions:

1. If you could create anything, regardless of its cost or difficulty, what would you create?
2. If you could achieve that goal by investing $5,000 of your own money, would you do so? What about $10,000? What about $50,000? Would you be willing to invest $50,000 of your own cash, if you had it and thought you had a good chance of success? How much would you be willing to invest? What is your cutoff number?
3. If the creation of your business enabled you to truly make a living from your creativity, this might lead to a feeling of happiness, a sense of pride, accomplishment and meaning. Many people strive for a feeling of meaning and happiness in their lives. What is your’s worth to you?
4. What value do you place upon great personal accomplishment? Would you be willing to take out a loan to accomplish your goal? What would you be willing to put up as collateral? Collateral has to be something that is at least equal (typically greater) value to what you are borrowing.
   
5. In most movies we watch, our adventure hero goes into the unknown and faces push-back. They face obstacles that seem to test their very fabric, their abilities and stamina–who they are and what they can do. Our obstacles have a way, the longer we are in the game, of becoming larger and more complex. Are you willing to face recurring and ever more difficult obstacles, before reaching your goals?
6. In every hero adventure film, novel or play, our hero finds him or herself struggling at some point. Are you willing to struggle? When you are building something of considerable value or you are breaking molds or challenging the status quo with new and better ideas, you will experience push-back. Change is by nature a violent process. The seed breaks to be come a tree. Eggs must be cracked to make an omelet. Scientists believe our universe to have been created from a big Bang! The process of change-making and entrepreneurship is no different. This is call creative destruction. Are you willing to go through hardship?

If you find that the value you seek is worth going through these barriers and thresholds of entrepreneurship, then go for it. If you find that you have answered, “Yes!” to most of these questions, go for it. If you find, “Yikes! No thanks.”, then you have come to know this path is not for you and need no longer think about it for now. Now you know.

Tips: It should be noted that personal investment of one’s own cash is not always necessary and can be the riskiest of options. Though most entrepreneurs do start by reaching into their own pockets, investors and donors may abound. In this exercise, one is asked about their own investment capital to assess what their dreams are worth to them.

One can also bootstrap their process, spending only the cash they have in-hand, generated by the business they operate. Bootstrapping is the least risky option of the various funding options of entrepreneurship.

If you would like to use these games in your own classroom, please do! If you do, let me know how how it goes and if you have suggestions for modifying a game. 

I can be reached at jdhart@smu.edu. 

What Would You Risk? by James David Hart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.