Face Front! Friday! Happy Birthday, Stan Lee
For the last two weeks, I’ve been sharing the idea of BRIGHT goal setting: Make your goals big, make sure they’re relevant, plan the items to accomplish, know your guardrails, be sure you can understand and explain how you will measure your success, and set up time milestones that you can achieve.
How’s this for a big goal: at the start of my teaching career, I set the big goal of becoming the Stan Lee of marketing professors.
If you’ve seen a movie from the #MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) like The Avengers, Black Panther, Iron Man, Captain America, even Spider-Man… the you saw Stan Lee pop up in a cameo role, This guy, Stan Lee, created or co-created just about every character you see in those movies and adjacent TV shows.
Stan Lee, who passed in 2018, was born on December 28th. So today let’s celebrate his creative genius.
From the time I was 9 until I graduated from high school, comic books meant everything to me. And I bought them. I ended up with quite a little collection. Literally, several thousand books, some worth quite a bit, protected in Mylar bags.
And I sold just about all of them in 1986, to help pay the bills that any newlywed couple, both in grad school, have to pay.
Stan Lee made just about every Marvel hero you’ve seen and while he didn’t do it alone, it could not have happened without him. His collaborators were also magnificent creators and storytellers and certainly never received as much credit as they deserved.
I’ve read several Stan Lee biographies and those of his collaborators, and it’s pretty common knowledge that Stan Lee was human and his self-promotion bordered on insufferable.
Now the good part.
He was the mentor I never met.
And here’s the thing about setting big goals… while I don’t know if anybody would call me the Stan Lee of anything, including teaching, having that big goal provided the north star for my own work, formed from reading the stories that Stan Lee wrote or inspired. And for wanting to create stories like Stan did.
One of my older daughter’s most prized memories is meeting Stan the Man himself at a comic book convention. As she waited in line, getting closer to the table, she called me on her phone. As she stepped up to Stan Lee, she shoved the phone in his face and asked him to say “hello” to her dad. And he did. We spoke for several minutes.
(If I may engage in just a little self-promotion, she learned that trick from her old man, who did the same thing to Monty Python legend Michael Palin at a book signing several years earlier)
If Stan knew that I sold almost my entire comic book collection to help pay the bills he’d probably say something like “that’s the way the cookie crumbles, effendi!”
Stan Lee, through his medium, was a crusader for equality, against bigotry and racism, against drug abuse and classism and crooked politicians back in the 1960s and 1970s. This is true and I think his stories about the little guys, the marginalized and disadvantaged also had an effect on me.
So happy birthday to the late, great Stan Lee. From the way I talk to the way I think and act, thank you. If I can even come anywhere close to my BRIGHT career goal of being “The Stan Lee of Marketing Professors,” I will be proud. Thank you for everything you’ve given me.
‘Nuff said.
What do you think?
See you tomorrow!
#StanLeeDay #BRIGHTgoals #Marvel #ComicBook #Mentor #TeachingInspiration #Goalseetting