Successful entrepreneurship is the American Dream

An entrepreneurial mindset can be described as a group of meta-physical dispositions, also known as entrepreneurial spirit, which lead to the innovative practice of identifying and/or creating opportunities, then acting to manifest those opportunities in a productive way. The philosophical themes - existentialism, axiology, pragmatism, ethics - are thereby understood to be strange attractors influencing the construction of the entity’s persona as well as the concrete practices of the entity.

An alternative conceptualization of Entrepreneurial Mindset:
Somebody with an entrepreneurial mindset has the means, ability, and the desire (MAD) to materialize his vision. If any of those three pillars do not exist, and the entrepreneur cannot bring his or other's resources to create all three, then the entrepreneurial mindset does not exist. You can go further into exploring the allocation and utilization of resources in novel ways or realizing opportunities where others do not and those are all important but are subservient to and come out as a consequence of the above three entrepreneurial pillars.

The Means: Capital. Access to resources. Be it angel funding, self funding, access to political capital, the ability to harness labor, high tech assembly, etc or some combination of the above. It generally takes something (usually but not always money) to make something else.

The Ability: Having the physical and mental capacity to understand their vision in ways required to succeed in their planned goals. Ability generally refers to being sufficiently adept in organizing the resources available to you in novel ways. It does not necessarily dictate a need to have all of the answers from the beginning. Entrepreneurs tend to constantly adjust their course as they proceed, in contrast to large organizations which must chart their course years before taking their first step.

The Desire: Lots of great ideas are out there. But it takes the alignment of ability, means AND the desire to invest in those ideas to make them happen. Very few entrepreneurial projects are small endeavors with spectacular results. Most take a personal investment of the entrepreneurs time and thus must yield sufficient payoff in exchange for that time investment, even if the work is self rewarding. Profits enable the entrepreneur to continue investing themselves in newer, bigger projects.

"The entrepreneurial mind-set transcends the confines of family and tradition, opening individuals up to modern styles of consciousness and securing them a place in modern industrial society" (Brigitte Berger in Spinosa, Flores, Dreyfus, 1997, p.57)