This 31-question quiz–adapted from the Entrepreneurial Personality Quiz in Instinct: Tapping Your Entrepreneurial DNA to Achieve Your Business Goals, by Thomas L. Harrison–is based on the widely used, five-factor model of personality identified in 1985 by Paul Costa Jr. and Robert McCrae of the National Institute on Aging. The five factors underpinning the model are Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism–which combine to form the catchy acronym OCEAN.
Note: Take the quiz before continuing to read about the methodology behind it. You’ll give yourself the best chance of answering the questions honestly, rather than trying to select the ones that yield the result you might want to hear. Entrepreneurship is hard enough–if you’re fundamentally not suited to it, you’ll want to know. The quiz is not intended as a medical diagnostic tool or a substitute for medical advice. You must answer all 31 questions to get a meaningful assessment.
The quiz assesses each of the five personality factors by examining six secondary traits that comprise each factor. (See explanations of each factor below.) The questions present hypothetical situations drawn from Harrison’s interviews with hundreds of successful entrepreneurs. Each answer says something about your entrepreneurial bent, though some answers yield a neutral result (suggesting someone neither more nor less entrepreneurial in nature).
Certain questions receive more weight than others–such as questions related to the ability to take action, a must-have quality for any entrepreneur. No one question, or even certain bunches of them, tells the whole story. Rather, it’s the combination of traits–and how well they are managed–that is critical to entrepreneurial success. That’s why it’s important to answer all 31 questions to truly see where you fall on the overall entrepreneurial continuum.
Here is more information on each of the five factors:
Openness to Experience
Many entrepreneurs exhibit a high degree of openness, which can help them recognize new opportunities and alternative ways of doing things. (The term of art here is "seeing around corners.”) Having a low degree of openness isn’t all bad, though. It can be valuable when having to enforce regulations or to pursue well-defined, specific goals, such as a new-product launch.
Conscientiousness
Entrepreneurs low on conscientiousness will need to improve their planning–or find the right partners to keep everything on track. The highly conscientious should try to avoid being so inflexible and rule-bound that they are unable to respond to rapidly changing circumstances.
Extroversion
Extroversion is an obvious asset for entrepreneurs constantly stumping for capital or customers. Those low on extroversion should be mindful that their reserve may be misinterpreted as unfriendliness or arrogance.
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
Understand that none of these traits is an unmixed blessing. Depending on the situation, each can help, hurt or simply be irrelevant. And each one, taken to an extreme, can become a problem.
For instance, being very open but not conscientious could mean that you have a tendency to leave a lot of things unfinished—a handicap for anyone looking to get a business off the ground and make it thrive. Agreeable types might attract plenty of customers and partners only to be hamstrung by their inability to trust their own decision-making instincts. Neuroticism may sound awful, but if you never feel anxiety, anger or depression, people may doubt your commitment and enthusiasm.
The trick here: getting the most out of the entrepreneurial aspects of your personality while taking steps (within or without) to shore up the weaknesses.
It all starts with understanding your personality. Take the quiz—and again, remember to answer all the questions and answer them honestly. You also can see how your responses stack up with serial entrepreneurs featured in Forbes.