Don’t Ignore Your Spider-Sense
When I was a kid I was a huge Spider-man fan. I had subscriptions to all the comic books and for years I followed the life of Peter Parker and his adventures as the crime-fighting web slinger. He had some cool powers but one of my favorites was his “spider-sense.” Whenever something dangerous was about to pounce on him his “spider-sense” would warn him and he would jump out of the way just in time to avoid being hurt or killed.
As an adult I started describing gut feelings as spider-sense. Whenever I didn’t listen to my spider-sense I would kick myself. “You’re spider-sense told you not to speed over that hill. You didn’t listen and now you have a ticket.” My wife even began to use the phrase. Sometimes we listened to that warning in our heads, or spider-sense, and made good decisions about our life or a moment, and sometimes we didn’t. Over time we learned to listen to it more and more.
Recently I’ve been working with a big client on a Web site redesign. The client is difficult to work with because they don’t know much about Web design or Internet business, but they want to be involved with every step of the redesign process. They have had some good ideas but mostly bad ones and I diplomatically knocked down idea after idea until I felt I was wearing them down. Instead of staying at it and sharing my experiences with them on design elements I backed off and let them run with a few things I thought could be done better. My spider-sense told me this was a bad idea.
I should have listened to my spider-sense because the client was informed that something I let them do was not a best practice. They were frustrated even more than when I was a rejecting all their previous ideas. I had a gut feeling and I ignored it hoping to appease a difficult client. This was the wrong thing to do. I ignored my spider-sense.
Most of the time when we are about to get into a dire situation something is telling us it’s a bad idea. We are guided to do what is right and most of the time the answers are there for us. They may not be the answers we want to hear but they are there if we take the time to listen. If you look back on your life at what has gone right and what has gone wrong you may remember the tingle of your spider-sense. When your spider-sense is tingling you better listen because often that’s the best guide you’ve got.