“My Hall of Mentors” by Ntsiki Mkhize packs a lifetime of lessons into a quick and easy read. The author, a social entrepreneur and runner-up for Miss South Africa, has been mentored by several top South African entrepreneurs. She took their lessons and packed them into a book that represents several decades of hard-won wisdom.

She delivers the lessons quickly and succinctly. I particularly liked the section at the end of each chapter where she summarizes the key take-aways in bite-sized, actionable chunks.

She also provides a brief exercise at the end of each chapter to inspire concrete thinking and action. She uses an enjoyable story-telling format to share her learnings. If you enjoyed the style in “Built to Sell” by John Warrilow and “The Mindful Entrepreneur” by Joel Gerschman, then you will also enjoy her style.

I do wish that she had used this style throughout the book. In fact, she could expand every single chapter into an entire book in its own right, using the same style. Her storytelling ability would serve her well in this regard, and we get hints of it in this book. There is still a lot that we can learn from the author, considering that she is only still in her twenties. It would be interesting to see how she further extends the lessons and personalizes them in follow up books. Given her age, one guesses that she has not yet had the time to fully try all the lessons that she speaks about. This comes across in some theoretical tidbits that she includes in each chapter. This in a way reduces the uniqueness of the book. She’s a practical person writing a practical book. The theory sometimes detracts from her message.

At an objective level, the book could have benefitted from one final proofreading pass. There were several instances of grammatical and punctuation (not spelling) errors. Also, in a few instances, the writing style and sentence construction could have been clearer. This is a bold book, and it would have benefited from a bold writing style.

She is an author to follow. And this is a book to read.