What Does a Growth Mindset and Tokyo Drifting Have to do With each other?: Never Underestimate People

The Fast and the Furious movie franchise has been one of the most successful movie series in the last 2 decades. All about a group of street racers and their adventures. But in my book, the best one is Fast & Furious  3:Tokyo Drift which introduces a new character and takes place obviously, in Tokyo. 

This movie is a classic story: Sean Boswell is the ultimate outsider, never fitting in anywhere in the USA and getting in trouble through illegal street racing until he ends up in Japan with his dad to stay out of Juvenile detention. Here he discovers the Japanese street racing scene with their unique drifting style. Of course, he ends up falling for the girl of the main villain Takashi aka Drift King & races him. Sean loses badly and smashes up the very expensive car he borrows. Complete disaster. But he is quickly taken under the wing of the ultra cool Han (Sang Kang) who mentors him in the way of drifting and life. He eventually triumphs and wins both the girl and big race in the end. 

Not the best synopsis here but it’s to give context to my main point. His opponents destroyed him so badly in the first race they never took him seriously afterwards. A fixed mindset. But they never saw Sean train so rigorously in drifting. He improved so much that he won both against DKs cousin and then even DK. They underestimated him. While Sean was able to tap into his humiliation and wrecked ego to push himself & win in the end. He had a growth mindset as per Carol Dweick. 

There is direct relevance here to startups, to investing in startups and people. People with growth mindsets win. People with fixed mindsets stall out in life. Frankly speaking, I find people who have had success too early in life tend to have fixed mindsets, as they don’t want things to change. It’s the one who has faced loss or humiliation that tends to want to change. Watch out for these folks. 

This is why I usually don’t invest in founders whose first startup has done incredibly well ie. a big exit. Because they usually have lost the fire & hunger to win they once had. They usually tend to draw the wrong lessons from their success and more often than not, are arrogant and stop learning. This kills startups. 

This is also why I prefer to get to know founders over time where possible, which is not always doable these days. But it’s important both to build a relationship as you will be entering into a long term business partnership together.  It is also to see how they progress and learn & recover from setbacks. As I tell many founders, I don’t care so much about traction but the traction definitely shows me they are growing and learning along the way. 

The key point is never underestimate people, especially if you are on the top. In fact, never underestimate countries, especially ones made up of hungry smart people. Never count someone out. People can always surprise you as it’s in the human condition to grow.