Arthur C. Brooks argues that falling in love and building a family is a bigger risk than starting a business. Marriage and children demand more emotional commitment than launching a startup like Apple, and confessing love matters more than chasing venture capital.
The best example of the biggest entrepreneurial risk that leads to the biggest rewards is falling in love. That is the ultimate enterprise. A family, a marriage, babies. That's an enterprise. That's way bigger deal than Apple Computer. And I talk to my students about this all the time. I say, you want to be an entrepreneur? Go. Yeah, good. Go raise $25 million in venture and throw it behind your crazy scheme on the internet. I don't care. You wanna be a real entrepreneur? Give your heart away. Tell that girl that you're secretly in love with her and let her stomp all over it. Maybe, or maybe baby say, I like you too. That's risk that really, really matters. And when you take risk with a sense of prudential judgment— and by the way, prudence in the classical sense is not not taking risk, it's taking the right amount of risk. So taking prudent risk in search of explosive returns for things that really matter, then risk is the best thing ever.
