spider-man story: don’t let some idiot talk you out of a great idea

I’m not sure if I have mentioned this before, but I am a huge Marvel fan, and as a kid, I used to have Spider-Man posters on my walls and loved doing the web-shooting gestures and crawling postures whenever I got a chance.

Today, on December 17th, as the new Spider-Man movie Spider-Man: No Way Home releases worldwide, I am thrilled and super excited that I’ll be watching it soon in the nearby theater. If you’re a Spider-Man enthusiast, you know how special this movie is going to be. And so, on this occasion, I wanted to dedicate this post in honor of our friendly neighborhood superhero. 

In June 2017, the late, great comic book writer and publisher Stan Lee sat down in front of that year’s UCLA Extension Certificate class to deliver a keynote graduation speech. In this speech, Stan shared the story of how the iconic Spider-Man came into being and how the idea of this new teenage superhero was almost squashed. After being told that it was a terrible idea, Stan decided to move forward with the idea anyway and the rest, as we know, is history. 

Stan, in this impactful talk, provides us an important reminder to exclusively share our ideas with the right people and to ignore anyone who tries to talk us out of something that we know in our heart of hearts is something good and special.

I encourage you to listen to this speech whenever you encounter criticism and flak for a creative idea that you know can be a game-changer in your field. Here are a couple of quotes from this speech:

“I’m not going to make a long speech but I’m going to tell you I was told to tell an anecdote. Anecdotes are easy. So I thought to myself what kind of anecdote can I tell these people who really have more important things to do and I figured I’m going to tell you how Spider-Man came into being it’s a true story although sometimes it’s hard, even for me to believe it.”

“Now why am I telling you this?… If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good don’t let some idiot talk you out of it. Now that doesn’t mean that every wild notion you come up with is going to be genius but if there is something that you feel is good something you want to do something that means something to you try to do it because I think you can only do your best work if you’re doing what you want to do.”