Look Out for the Little Guy!

by Scott Lang

I’d like to start with the positives: I returned five million dollars to our customers and exposed VistaCorp’s nefarious dealings to the public. And, on the other side, I also drove an extremely expensive sports car into an extremely expensive pool, and myself into San Quentin Federal Penitentiary for three years.

that divorce, plus imprisonment, effectively separated me from my dear, sweet daughter, Cassie. For way too many of her precious first few years. I wondered if she and I would ever even have the chance to make a connection.

wasn’t just cranky old semi-retired scientists tracking me down anymore—now I’d caught the attention of Earth’s Mightiest.

And if you want to really get to know who Scott Lang is, reading this book is where I’d recommend you start. So at this point, I bet you also have a very serious question—one which I’ve asked myself over a thousand times a day while writing this: Why on Earth is Scott Lang the first Super Hero writing a book? I mean, just between us, I’m proud to be an Avenger, but sometimes I also feel like a “latecomer.” Sure, I came through in the ultimate clutch, but in baseball terms, I’m not a starter—I’m a DH (designated hero). Here’s how I see it: I’m the “everyman Avenger.” I’m the one you could grab a beer with, the one you’d feel okay asking to look after your dog when you’re away or for a drive to the airport. I’m not a Super Soldier or a billionaire (unless this book is super-successful), just a regular dad, a San Francisco Giants fan, and a guy who’s made mistakes I’m still trying to rectify. In a word, I’m an ordinary guy who’s been thrust—more than once—into extraordinary circumstances. And I know that still doesn’t completely answer the question of why I wrote this book. The simple answer is, “The Avengers asked me to.”

Even with their sensible reasons, the whole affair just stirred up a question that’s been burning inside me most of my adult life: Why me? I’ve been asking myself that since before I even met the Avengers. Back when I was working at VistaCorp, why was I the only one who couldn’t sleep at night after learning of all the money they were stealing from customers? Why did I basically give up my job, give up my marriage, and spend three years in San Quentin, just so I could play Robin Hood? And finally—and this one still smarts—when VistaCorp’s nasty business became public to the world, why was I the one who ended up going down for it? I don’t know the answers to these questions. And perhaps I never will. Not even Doctor Strange can tell me, and believe me, it’s not for my lack of asking. Once the purple dust had settled from the Battle of Earth, I tried bonding with the guy. Let’s just say, he was either unwilling or uninterested in filling me in about any of my 14,000,605 possible pasts.

That VistaCorp/prison experience taught me that our world is broken. And that it’s never going to get fixed unless folks like me—the unlikely ones—step up to the job. And when Hank Pym plucked me out of the ex-con pool and put me to work as Ant-Man 2.0, I started to see the haziest outlines of a “why” for me. Maybe all those hard years I had just endured were actually preparation for a higher purpose.

You don’t ask why. You ask, “Where do I go from here?” Because that’s the job life has for you, at least right at this moment, and it’s the kind of job you don’t get to quit. You can run, but you can’t hide—not even if you can shrink yourself down and leap into a bathtub.

You are in this place and time for a reason, and no one else is. And so—when that next uncertain, unlikely, “impossible” step is revealed to you—I urge you with every particle in my body, Pym or otherwise, to turn that “Why me?” into a “Why not me?”

finally, because—if you take nothing else away from my words—what I want to share is that what makes all of us giants is how much we look out for the little guy. How we help out our fellow humans when they need it most. How our greatest super-power can simply be a listening ear, a concerned eye, or an outstretched hand. How we don the “hero’s uniform” by simply showing up and doing the unbelievably unlikely job that life has just handed us.

SOME PEOPLE SAY THE hardest thing in life is starting something. But I say, it’s starting all over again.

in multiple situations, I’ve had to hit the reset button on my own life. And every single time, no matter how many times you do it, it’s hard. And it’s scary. We humans tend to get addicted to the familiar, even in nearly intolerable situations. We cling like hell to what we know. So what happens when those things disappear and we’re left flailing in midair with nothing to cling to?

I’ll get into this in more detail in a second, but basically, we have to find a new, unexplored part of ourselves to latch on to. That’s how we climb back up into being a new us in a new world. I’m seeing a lot of this fear and confusion right now among my friends. With the existential threat of Thanos behind us, a bunch of my hero peers are just learning, for the first time, how to move on. Whether it’s passing the torch (or hammer, or shield, or bow and arrow) to someone new—or, like Hope, trading in the Wasp suit for a corporate pantsuit. For me, all I’m trying to focus on right now is finishing this book. And when I’m done, I’ll certainly be trying to figure out my own next chapter. But here’s the surprising part: Having been around this existential merry-go-round a few times now, this time I’m actually kind of psyched for the wild and unpredictable ride awaiting me next. What’s my secret? Well, you know the old cliché “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”? That cliché wants to force you to create your next move out of what you’ve been given. But there’s one very important word in there that’s often ignored: YOU. In other words, forget the lemons. Life has already given you a you that’s like no other. And that’s what you’re better off making stuff out of.

ALLOW YOURSELF TO MOURN WHAT’S GONE.

Tears are acidic, which means they dissolve stuff. But not just chemically—spiritually. They don’t dissolve your strength. They dissolve the glue that keeps you sealed into an earlier version of yourself.

Don’t dam up that flood, let it roll over you, because in the end it will wash you clean.

FIGURE OUT HOW TO REBUILD.

Separate out what you and others say you are from what you can do. Shift your focus from adjectives to verbs.

through his actions, Hank Pym told me that I was really good at sneaking in and stealing things. Not the world’s best compliment, I admit. Even if that’s about the highest praise anyone ever gets from Hank Pym. But Hank had a clear purpose behind that clear-eyed assessment of me. He wanted me to steal for a good reason, and he wanted the guy who’s best at it. Over time, Hank showed me how to find that “best guy” within me. By redirecting who I already was into a guy who still snuck in and stole things, but in a different way and for a nobler cause.

You are so much more than who you “were.” Especially as you get further away from what shaped you in the past. You aren’t limited by who you are. Or at least the way others describe you.

You are what you can do. To rebuild is to take what you know how to do—no matter how unconventional or questionable that skill might seem to you now—and figure out how to do it differently. How to use it to take your life in a new direction. A better one.

I wasn’t expecting to get any life lessons from prison, other than “how to survive.” But looking back, I can tell you one thing I learned: how to free up my mind and create a whole life out of limited space and mobility. And I brought that freedom to my new digs.

Now that I was barred by an international body from fighting bad guys, I needed something to pound on. So I decided to learn the drums. This was not only cathartic, it had an added sanity-preserving bonus: When I really cranked it up, my noises were disturbing enough to get neighbors yelling into my windows, “Keep it down!” or “I’m trying to sleep!” or “Learn a second song!” Yes! Human connection!

When you’re pulled in all directions at all times, you can lose sight of what really matters in your life. Yes, your life is technically, physically free, but at the same time, you’re not necessarily living your life. You’re seeking comfort or avoiding pain, putting out fires, operating on muscle memory, and most of all, just plain getting distracted. You’re a hamster on a wheel of your own making.

To truly take charge, he said, you have to prove to the ants that you can navigate the world as they do, alongside them at their scale, acting for all intents and purposes as if you belonged in the colony.

I learned more about leadership that day in an anthill than any MBA program could teach: observe your team, learn the correct leadership style for them, be clear and direct, and show that you understand where they’re coming from.

SOME COUPLES HAVE A “meet-cute.” Some meet online. Many more meet at a bar than is really advisable. Hope and I had a meet-weird. And I don’t mean just how, the first time we laid eyes on each other, I was waking up in her father’s bed, surrounded by a brigade of sentry ants prepared to devour me like a giant bread crumb. Or that we got to know each other’s “vulnerabilities” through weeks of brutal martial-arts training. Or that the first time we shared a tear, it wasn’t after an argument or a sappy movie. It was over the death of a half-inch-long insectile colleague named “Ant-thony.” (RIP wherever you are, little guy!) And the way we originally met…? Let’s just say, how many relationships have you had that began with you breaking into your (future) partner’s dad’s basement to steal a piece of secret technology? At least there was one way in which our relationship was typical: We had a little “difficult patch” and broke up for a while. But even then, the way we got back together was…okay, once again, weird.

one thing I’ve learned about being in a relationship (sometimes the hard way!) is that two different people can experience the same thing together…in two entirely different ways.

Hope says she experienced somewhat…different feelings during that reunion. In her words: “Disgust. Did you spend the entire two years in that bathrobe? And also, disgust on a deeper level. Seeing you again, remembering you in Dad’s suit, and what you had done with it, it brought up all kinds of complicated feelings I’d been trying to put behind me.” Fortunately for both of us (and eventually, the world) Hope doesn’t let any feeling get in the way of a mission. Especially one involving her mother. Janet Van Dyne, wife of Hank, formerly known as The Wasp, had been trapped in the Quantum Realm for decades, but she had recently found a way to contact us. And now we were going to try to find her by going back into Hank’s Quantum Tunnel.

Something like 95 percent of the stuff I get wrapped up in involves “technology falling into the wrong hands.” To say nothing of the risks of the technology even in the right hands. Even with less advanced tech, this is always a risk. But what’s the alternative? Don’t continue innovating? The way my fellow Super Heroes and I try to address this issue is by keeping a close eye on what we call “a change in the battlefield.” By that I mean we pay attention to the news and take note when something that’s been basically impossible for a human to achieve suddenly happens. Then we know there’s been a “battlefield change,” that some new ability or device has entered the arsenal of Earth dwellers (or visitors). And that it’s probably not going to be used for good.

OKAY, SO NOW HOPE and I were back together, for what seemed like the long haul. Which meant we were now facing one of those paradoxes of life: Sometimes you fight the most with the one you love. But what if you’re also simultaneously fighting Super Villains?

Sometimes in the heat of battle, I can’t help but stop and think, “She likes me?” This usually happens right before I get knocked unconscious.

Put simply, every day the two of us come back home together, in one piece, is a miracle, a precious gift. The most precious gift, to which no super-power granted by serum or gamma ray or technology could compare. And when you’ve got that, you are the most literal definition of invincible.

if there’s one takeaway from my highly unusual life, it’s that sometimes the tiniest things can offer the key to salvation.

I mean, I’ve been in the Quantum Realm, which is full of all kinds of crazy stuff, but I can state with almost 100 percent certainty that the Quantum Realm doesn’t include intelligent life-forms.

sure, we all hypothesized that “something else was out there” when a hammer-wielding god showed up from beyond. Suspicions may have been raised further when an army of those ugly Chitauri and their even uglier Leviathan robo-lizard transports rained down onto New York City. But to me and the average person just going about their life without regular galactic dispatches from Captain Marvel, it might have well looked like that was basically a one-time hole in the NY skyline that got patched up.

there’s really just one critical thing you, Dear Reader, need to know about what happened that day: Tony Stark—a man who either had, or could have had, literally anything he wanted in the world—instead gave up his life to save the world. There are no words that can capture that feeling. There’s no way for me—or anyone, really—to count how many perished on that field or in the rest of the galaxy, with so many heroes trying to stop Thanos. All I know is, the sacrifices were unmistakably heroic, and clear and obvious to all. But possibly only a dad who had lost time with a little girl so many times, who had just a tiny shot at a life with her, fully grasped what else Tony Stark was giving up. And it kills me even more—I can barely write this without tearing up—to think that, knowing all that, knowing and feeling all the same things that I feel about that, Tony still chose to be a self-sacrificing hero. The guy who needed to show up and step up and do the job, right then and there. And he did. So in the end, our world got back half of its people…but lost a truly great man.

A Super Hero is theoretically always prepared for death while in action. But when it comes to life span (or as many see it, the amount of time they get to stick around and do good), reminders of that finitude can hurt.

Getting to step into significantly larger shoes—whether literally or just in our ordinary lives—can have two equally dangerous effects on our psyches. We can shrink in self-doubt from what we’re truly capable of. Or we can inhabit our new power boldly, but forget the humble size we began as. Because, at some point in our lives, or maybe two, or three, most of us get the chance to be “the big one” relative to someone else. We just find ourselves there, whether it’s on the playground or the break room or just being around our kids. For a lot of people, it can be overwhelming, as it was for me.

Q: Can you introduce me to the Avengers? A: Man, if I had a nickel for every time I got asked this…I could pretty much buy my own Quinjet. So, in brief, sorry, not really. As you might imagine, being Super Heroic also means they’re all super-busy. Clint also has his hands full with his family and a new protégé. And Bruce? I never know where (like, even on what world) he is, but he’s always busy. You didn’t hear this from me, but if you really want to meet a Super Hero, may I humbly suggest putting yourself in mortal danger from an otherworldly being?

Now I’ve worked alongside some of the strongest and bravest Super Heroes who’ve ever walked the earth. But the heroes that have had the largest impact on my life have been the ones with no powers other than the eyes to see a person in need, and the voice to offer words of support.

Because folks try all kinds of ways to hide their troubles. In our world, sadly, there’s nothing more “uncool” than being an actual, real-live person with real-live vulnerabilities. But ultimately, it’s all visible in their eyes. And that’s how you can reach someone safely, across that Curtain of Cool. Whatever their fast-moving mouth or lying smile try to tell you, you can see when something makes their gaze falter.

ants are the ultimate team players. They’re not the only creatures with a strong social nature, but they’re up there. You’ve heard of “ant colonies”? Well, one species has reportedly formed a colony that’s got more than 300 million ants, ranged up and down the coast of Europe. Which, to be honest, makes it sound pretty luxurious to be an ant! And just imagine how hard it must be to reach common agreement among 300 million of your fellow…anythings. The Avengers & co. would sometimes practically break out into a second civil war over whether to order lunch from the usual Italian place or the usual Thai place.

“Look, here’s the bottom line,” Hank concluded. “Before we blow things wide open and start planning what sizes everything in creation could be, maybe we need a better grasp on our own limitations as a species!”

What I learned from being Giant Dad is that the only people who should be huge in your life are those whom you choose to have in your life. I know you felt how big the gap was when your friends and loved ones got blipped away for five years. So now that they’re back, make sure they know now how much they fill those gaps in for you—like, every day.

Never let yourself get defined by anyone else’s notions of how “big” or “small” you are in their eyes. You alone decide your size, with or without a fancy red size-changing button. And that also means you—and nobody else—are in charge of deciding when to make yourself “big” or “small” in any given situation. Be big when speaking up against an unfair boss, a disrespectful partner, and an unjust government or corporation. I’ve already seen you doing some of this, and I couldn’t be prouder. But be careful—the last thing we need is two Langs spending time behind bars! And also: Be small enough to admit fault, as well as what you don’t know and need to learn.

You never really know which moments of your life will turn out to be the ones that mean the most. So you might as well embrace all of them!

Look out for the little guy. Make mistakes. Take chances. Because if there’s one thing life’s taught me, there’s always…room to grow.