Today so happens to be Spiderman's birthday, easily my favorite superhero created by Marvel. I was reading an article about our friendly neighborhood Spiderman, and it turns out, Stan Lee's idea for a normal teenage superhero was, at the outset laughed at; Peter Parker was "hardly superhero material." Turns out, Stan Lee was right, and the publisher was dead wrong.
This seems to be a common theme in business, not just comic book characters or entertainment as a whole. Many ideas that are now considered ingenious were originally scoffed at and deemed nonsense. Take for instance, the light bulb, The Pet Rock, the umbrella, even coffee! Nowadays, we couldn't imagine our lives without these items (okay, maybe not the pet rock), but all of these ideas were considered crazy at the time of their conception. Why is this so?
What all of these items have in common is at one point, they were remarkable. Different. Nothing like them had existed before, therefore no one could wrap their heads around the benefit these things could bring. Publishers and CEOs don't know what consumers want. Even the consumers don't know what they want until it's staring them in the face in a red and blue suit. It takes a special kind of person to pursue an idea everyone else wants to criticize, but that's just being an entrepreneur.
Take Citizen Kane for instance, often considered the greatest film of all time. Why? When it was first released it wasn't met with much praise, so why now is it considered to be so great? It was remarkable. Orson Welles used cinematic techniques pretty normal by today's standards, but in 1941 they were anything but. His techniques can now be found in countless films today, but that's only because he was willing to do something different.
So if you have an idea most people think is crazy, chances are you have a great idea. Or, you're just crazy. But why not give it a shot and see for yourself?
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