We’re going to bet everyone reading this has spent a good amount of time imagining all the cool stuff they wish they could do. Yet we almost always refuse to act on these thoughts due to lack of money, balls, or both. With that in mind, we thought it’d be fun to list ten people who said, “screw this — I have one life so I’m going to do something cool with it.” People like …
10. The Guy Who Paid Off His Student Loan, in Cash
We’re guessing half of the people reading this have a millstone made of student debt hung around their neck. There’s just something depressing about realizing you owe someone $80,000 and how, thanks to interest, you’ll likely owe them that much for the rest of your life.
Alex Kenjeev was having approximately none of that when he decided to pay off his entire loan in one go, in cash. Kenjeev had spent years dragging his heels on payments on his $190,000 loan until he could finally scrape together the scratch to pay off the final $114,000 chunk in one go. If you’re wondering why he did this, in his own words it was because “he thought it’d be funny.”
After getting the money, Kenjeev strolled right into his bank, threw the bag of money down on the front desk, and sat patiently while the bank manager flustered about how to even begin processing it. Almost 3 hours later, Kenjeev was entirely debt-free, and apparently loaded with lulz.
9. Ripping Up a Mortgage Repayment
Like student loans, mortgages are a cause of great frustration, since paying double what your house is actually worth over the course of 20 years while never once being allowed to slip up isn’t most people’s idea of fun. We can imagine that many people who are locked into paying a mortgage have dreamed of telling their bank to do one, before the image of their family being homeless forced them to go to work.
Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd had no such qualms, because while he didn’t rip up his mortgage papers, he ripped up other people’s. Floyd was an infamous bank robber from early 1900’s America. To endear himself to the public, and also because “screw banks,” while robbing them he’d go out of his way to tear up and destroy mortgage papers, effectively freeing ordinary people from the burden and tyranny of comically huge mustache-owning bankers.
8. Playing Monopoly with Real Money
If you’ve ever played Monopoly and bankrupted your own mother with those crafty brown properties (nobody expects the brown, baby,) you’ve no doubt felt your mind wander to thoughts of playing the game with real money.
Maybe you’ve played it while wagering shots, or perhaps with a few dollars staked on the eventual winner, but the real dream is to play it with huge wads of cash, like Rich Uncle Pennybags would have wanted. Well, the great train robbers actually did that. After committing one of the single most daring crimes in history, the robbers responsible hid in a farm. While waiting for everything to die down, hopefully while all hiding under a giant pile of coats, the group decided to play Monopoly with handfuls of the actual, real money they’d just stolen.
We hope you’re seeing this, everyone using the word “swag.” This is what it takes to actually use that word!
7. Winning a Gold Medal Without Even Trying
There’s a famous saying that nothing worthwhile is ever easy. Well we have another saying: sometimes it totally is. Just ask, Wyndham Halswelle, the only man in history to win an Olympic gold medal without even trying.
During the 1908 London Olympics, Halswelle was involved in a rather controversial 400 meter race, in which Halswelle was blocked by an American racer. Seeing this, an umpire immediately declared the race void, meaning it had to be re-ran. However, every other racer with the exception of Halswelle refused to run, meaning Halswelle was free to gently jog to the finish without incident and collect his gold medal. Sure he was still a good enough runner to get that far in the first place, but if Halswelle could win a gold medal without trying, you could too!
6. Stopping a Mugging Just Like a Superhero Would
In a world that is seemingly full of crime and corruption, you’d all be lying if you said you hadn’t once imagined what it’d be like to be like Batman — to stop a crime, save a life, and make the police look stupid and useless in the process. Well, we’re glad to inform you that not only has this happened, but the person responsible also got a cool nickname.
The story goes that a group of unarmed, undercover police officers were investigating a disturbance when they happened upon three men, armed with an assortment of weapons, terrorizing a lady in her home. Outnumbered and almost certainly about to be stabbed or bludgeoned to death, the police officers prayed for help, which came in the form of a katana-wielding stranger who stopped all three men, saved everyone involved, then quickly disappeared into the night.
Of course, as a reward for saving their lives, the police rewarded this “samurai stranger” (how cool is that?) by putting a warrant out for his arrest. Samurai Stranger, meet your new arch-nemesis: Captain By-The-Book.
5. Riding a Bear
Since quoting Anchorman stopped being funny around 8 seconds after the film was released, please head to the comments to type the quote you’re all currently thinking of.
Now then, the bear is one of the most terrifying and dangerous animals out there. Riding one would take balls so dense they’d cause the Earth to collapse inwards, just so you could go to Valhalla riding an explosion, as well as a bear made of fire. Also, you need to be absolutely insane. Just ask John Mytton.
Mytton was a noted eccentric from England who, when bored one day, bought a freaking bear and rode it around his house, for no other reason than to prove he could.
4. Refusing a King’s Offer
Be honest — you’ve all thought about how cool it would be to turn down someone way more famous/powerful than yourself just to say that you did. It’s like buying Bill Gates a drink. Sure he could afford to buy the entire brewery, but you’ll always be able to tell people that Bill Gates is totally in your pocket.
Well, Jemmy Hirst did something like that with the King of England. Hirst was well regarded as being a rather odd individual, doing things like training a bull to act as a horse and hunting foxes with pigs. These stories so interested the current King of England that he sent Hirst a personal invitation to see him, which Hirst immediately turned down because “he was teaching an otter to fish.”
If that wasn’t cool enough, when the King sent yet another invitation that Hirst accepted, a noble had the audacity to laugh at Hirst’s mannerisms, to which Hirst responded by throwing a glass of water in his face. Now, tell us you haven’t always wanted to do that to a snooty rich person without being body checked by an angry bodyguard.
3. Gaining Tons of Weight, Knowing You’ll Just Lose It All
Losing weight is tough, and takes years of sustained effort and sacrifice. Gaining weight, on the other hand, is as simple as not doing a damn thing while cramming pizza down your throat.
For most people, gaining weight isn’t a choice, but what if it was? What if someone offered you the chance to eat as much as you wanted for 6 months, then guaranteed that 6 months after that you’d have a body that looked like it was carved from recently-varnished wood? You’d jump on that offer like a shot, right?
Well that’s exactly what Drew Manning did. A personal trainer by profession, Drew intentionally gained 70 pounds, losing his chiseled physique and ability to pay for cabs by flexing, and gaining sagging man breasts in their place. Why? So he could lose it all again to show that anyone could do it if they just put their mind to it. Dubbed “fit to fat to fit,” Drew spent six months eating whatever the hell he wanted, then another six months exercising, then collected a sweet-ass book deal and national coverage at the end of it. Yes, this took a lot of effort on Drew’s part, but you have to admit that being paid to do nothing for a half-year is something everyone has dreamed of at least once.
2. Having Infinite Beer
Beer is awesome, except for the part where it costs money. Once funds dry out, then the party ends, except if you’re a Nobel prize winning scientist. After Niels Bohr, science badass, won a Nobel prize in 1922, the Carlsberg brewery gave him a gift in recognition of his accomplishments: a house right next to their main brewery, featuring a tap connected to their main pipeline that gave Bohr an infinite supply of ice-cold beer. Still think science is just for nerds?
1. Telling Your Boss to Screw Off In the Coolest Way Possible
Of all the things people around the world imagine on a day-to-day basis, punching their boss in the face and quitting while giving everyone the middle finger ranks among the most popular. Which is why we’d like to share Jourdan Anderson’s letter, perhaps the greatest example of telling your boss to get lost in history.
Now first things first: Anderson was a slave, so he already had a fairly good reason to hate his boss. After being freed, imagine his surprise when his ex-owner wrote him a letter basically begging him to come back and work his farm. With his old boss by the balls, Anderson decided to go for the jugular and wrote him a letter back agreeing to come back to work, but only if his old boss paid him $11,680 in back wages, for all the unpaid work he had done as a slave. That comes to damn near $170,000 in today’s money, which might help explain why Anderson’s old master never responded.
Said letter went the 1860’s version of viral, and Anderson’s masterful takedown of his jackass former boss is regarded as one of the finest burns in history, and the first and only recognized case of sunglasses appearing from nowhere to explode onto someone’s face.