The Entrepreneurial Instinct by Monica Mehta - Book review

The Entrepreneurial Instinct

How Everyone Has the Innate Ability to Start a Successful Small Business

By: Monica Mehta

Published: August 21, 2012
Format: Hardcover, 224 pages
ISBN-10: 0071797424
ISBN-13: 978-0071797429
Publisher: McGraw Hill










"Everything you need to take rewarding risks and start a financially successful business is already inside you", writes investor and adviser to entrepreneurs, and managing principal of Seventh Capital, Monica Mehta, in her pioneering and insightful book The Entrepreneurial Instinct: How Everyone Has the Innate Ability to Start a Successful Small Business. The author describes the traits and personal habits shared by successful entrepreneurs, and reveals the science behind their behavior.

Monica Mehta recognizes that the actions and activities of successful self-employed people has a basis in neuroscience. Their actions follow a framework of behavior that is different from those of most people. Monica Mehta demonstrates how the actions of successful entrepreneurs and the framework in which they they think and act, are learned behaviors. The author provides evidence that everyone has the built in ability to achieve entrepreneurial success. Monica Mehta offers an explanations that transforms the mystery, surrounding entrepreneurial acumen, into a process that can be learned and applied by anyone.

Monica Mehta (photo left) understands that the critical element of entrepreneurial thinking and behavior is instinct. The author points out that successful entrepreneurs rely upon those basic instincts, take risks, and develop a wealth generating business. The instinct guides the entrepreneur into areas of risk, and how that ability to take and manage risk is part of everyone's innate brain chemistry.

Monica Mehta outlines the framework that entrepreneurs develop and utilize instinctively, and shares the strategies and techniques for learning how to tap into this inborn ability. The author describes how entrepreneurs understand acceptable risk instinctively. The author also points out how successful entrepreneurs discover and grasp opportunities that they find all around them. The two main sections of the book, encompassing risk and opportunity, are as follows:

* Using Instinct to take rewarding risks
* Using instinct to launch a a financially successful business

For me, the power of the book is how Monica Mehta combines observation of the entrepreneurial instinct in action, with the neuroscience that makes that instinct an inborn component of everyone's brain. The author presents a compelling case that entrepreneurship is instinctual, and that all people possess the inborn ability to achieve success in their own businesses. The author maintains that these innate skills are systematically removed by society, and that only a few notable entrepreneurs avoided the process.

Monica Mehta presents evidence that while the skills have been replaced by other worldviews, the innate abilities remain intact. The author shares the latest neuroscience discoveries about the brain to bolster her case. She also offers a series of case studies and anecdotes that provide insights into the minds, actions, and habits of successful entrepreneurs. The author considers their success stories commonplace enough to indicate a framework and a pattern of behavior. This framework can be learned by anyone, in the view of the author.

I highly recommend the intriguing and engaging book The Entrepreneurial Instinct: How Everyone Has the Innate Ability to Start a Successful Small Business by Monica Mehta, to anyone seeking a groundbreaking and science based book on why entrepreneurs achieve success, and how anyone can emulate their instinctual framework of success. This book will change the way you view entrepreneurs, and how they accomplish their feats of business acumen.