I spent quite a lot of time writing a 25 page speech that I could give you and as I looked at I said would I want to hear this speech so I tore it up so I stand here now defenseless with nothing except to tell you I think you're all great the fact that you're taking the courses you're taking you're trying to help to add to what you already know to make yourself better workers better contributors and I think that's great I think also that I'm not gonna make a long speech but I'm gonna tell you I was told to say an anecdote anecdotes are easy so I thought to myself what kind of anecdote can I tell these people who have more important things to do and I figured I'm gonna tell you how spider-man came into being it's a true story although sometimes it's hard even for me to believe it but we had already done the fantastic four and I think maybe the x-men I can't remember the order but my publisher came to me and he said Stan I want you to come up with another superhero so I said okay you know went home and when my publisher said do something I better do it because I wanted to keep my job I thought what can I come up with now and the most important thing in a superhero at first is the superpower once you get that everything else comes along so I thought what power will I give a new guy and I saw a fly crawling on the wall and I said hey if I could get a superhero that would be cool so I thought that was good now I needed a name so let's see fly man mosquito man I got down to spider-man spider-man it just sounded dramatic so okay I had my hero I had his power his name and then I figured just for fun I'm gonna give him personal problems because except for you people that your lives are perfect but most other people have personal problems and then I thought I'd make him a teenager because there were no teenage superheroes that I know of at the time so armed with all that wonderful material those great ideas I ran into my publisher's office and I told him this was my reaction the worst idea I have ever heard first of all and he started to give me a very logical man very intellectual first of all people hate spiders so you can't call a hero spider-man you want him to be a teenager teenagers can only be sidekicks and you want him to have personal problems Stan don't you know what a superhero is they don't have personal problems well I left the office disappointed but obviously a much wiser man and I couldn't get spider-man out of my system so we were about to kill the magazine I think it was called amazing fantasy it wasn't selling well and we were sending the last issue to press when you do the last issue of the nobody cares what you're putting it because the book is dying just to get it out of my system I put spider-man in amazing fantasy feature him on the cover forgot about it a month later all the sales figures came in my publisher came racing into my office Stan Stan you remember that character we both loved so much spider-man let's do him as a series now why am I telling you this besides the fact that I have to kill a little time if you have an idea that you genuinely think is good don't let some idiot talk you out of it that doesn't mean that every wild notion you come up with is gonna 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 and if you're doing it the way you think it should be done and if you can take pride in it after you've done it no matter what it is you can look at it and say I did that I think it's pretty damn good that's a great feeling so don't let idiots talk you out of something that you think is good just do your thing do it as well as you that's the important thing don't shirk whatever you do give it your best shot you'll be glad you did you