Preface: Why do we play games? The research indicates that it helps people experience emotions associated with intrinsic happiness reserves’ main factors
What Dutch Blitz Can Teach About Entrepreneurship
Credit: Donald J. Sauder, CPA | CVA
Four decks of cards with forty cards in each deck…. two, three, or four players shuffling plows, pails, carriages, and pumps. Players can choose the deck they want. Each player shuffles their forty cards and places three top cards in the Post Pile, ten cards in the Blitz Pile. The objective? Dutch Blitz!
Dutch Blitz! The word to serious game enthusiast can conjure a gamut of feelings.
Winning at Dutch Blitz requires both luck and skill, and as with many games and trades, practice makes perfect. Enthusiasts create their own rules and add them to the standard rules to make the game more exciting and challenging.
So what is the connection between entrepreneurship and Dutch Blitz? With tax season approaching, we will take a moment to enjoy pace and look at a unique vantage point of business.
There is no business without a customer sale. That is a primary and elementary rule of business that every savvy entrepreneur appreciates. It differentiates companies from non-profits. Absent customer sales and revenue, everything is an expense!
Consider how Chegg earns revenue. College students will immediately recognize the name. Chegg Study is a $14.95 a month educational service that employs 70,000 subject experts to work free-lance online 24/7 providing step-by-step answers to questions from subscribers who are mostly students. Chegg helps students solve calculus problems, write bibliographies, and “get answers.”
A recent Forbes article on Chegg provides a surprising executive-level look at how CEO Dan Rosenwig has profited from building an online platform for higher education. College degrees can be now be achieved widely and with broad acceptance using techniques that breach university student honor policies. This has surged surprising with the conventional shifts to e-learning from the COVID-19 educational forums. Chegg bolstered degrees are the seeming growing future of the globe’s skilled trades. Future dentists, veterinarians, chemists, engineers are all onboard. The world is changing – rapidly.
These Chegg subscribers are who you may trust to help with provisions and health for your family. The social norms acceptance with modifications to the rules of education is likely to continue.
Many Dutch Blitz players migrate to more adventure, challenge, and thrill, as with entrepreneurship. And so, business norms continue to shift and advance.
Why do we play games? The research indicates that it helps people experience emotions associated with intrinsic happiness reserves’ main factors, i.e., we play games because they make us happy.
The game of business is to make a sale(s). Now, what Dutch Blitz teaches us about entrepreneurship? The majority of business sales are associated with credit. Credit cards bring purchasing power for fuel and food, bank financing for homes and autos, and HE-LOCS for lawnmowers.
The nation’s founding fathers gave clear warnings on the implications of credit-based economies and classic currencies. Two hundred forty-five years later, few are searching the scrips of 17th or 18th-century sages. Entrepreneurship is a part of an overarching mega-financial Dutch Blitz game.
People are passionately attached to the factors of happiness in this game. Yet, like any Dutch Blitz game, when players start to cheat to a substantial degree for more significant “happiness factors,” the happiness for the other player(s) is usually at risk.
Endeavor to be a savvy contributor to your Dutch-Blitz game(s) to bridge the game’s “happiness factor” to all those observing. After-all that is the purpose of the fun.