5 Epic Achievements That Aren't as Impressive as You Think

5 A Black Belt in a Martial Art

Our audience research shows that only about 60 percent of our readers are expert martial artists. If you're not one of those, you still know enough to realize that if a dude tells you he's a black belt in some fighting style, you shouldn't mess with him. Popular culture has taught you that this is somebody who has spent a lifetime mastering an art that will let him break wooden beams and human skulls with his bare fists.

After all, they don't hand those black belts out to just anybody. There is a sacred and probably ancient standard that only the most dedicated students can meet. Right? Well, not exactly ...

The Process:

Here's the most important thing to remember about accredited black belts: There is no such thing as an accredited black belt. It's not a college degree; it's a piece of clothing awarded to you by your teacher according to his own subjective criteria, which could be anything from hard work and crazy skills to having a lot of money. Hey, did we mention that any random dude off the street can become a martial arts instructor?

And as it turns out, the belt color system ranks among such other "ancient" wonders as driving and flying; it was invented barely a century ago. The first belt system was devised at the turn of the 20th century and was implemented for students of judo -- a style famous for literally not allowing the kicking of asses. Ever since, the black belt has served as an effective means of both showing off and making instructors' wages.

But it still means you can kick ass, doesn't it? It's not like any kid can get a black belt just for showing up and paying monthly fees, right? Wrong. Many schools now advertise black belts in a guaranteed time. You pay, then a year or two later you walk out with a black belt, regardless of how often or how well you trained. This happens so frequently that the martial arts community has come to call the schools "McDojos." Ask nicely and they'll tell you all about their birthday party packages while you're there.

Here's one story of a guy who paid cash up front after being guaranteed a black belt in two years. Sure enough, two years later he walked out with his belt without having to spar with a single opponent. It wasn't long before he and his friends realized they were little more than kung-fu break dancers -- it turned out that their teacher had left his own master at blue belt and started his own dojo. Wrong? Sure. Illegal? Not at all.

4 An Academy Award

Even if you don't watch the Academy Awards ceremony every year, you can't pretend it's not a big deal -- we're betting that you and every one of your friends can name more Oscar-winning actors than Nobel Peace Prize winners. Yet there have been some baffling choices over the years. Pulp Fiction lost to Forrest Gump (in three different categories), Stanley Kubrick never won Best Director for anything. Those were really questionable decisions by ... whom, exactly?

The Process:

That's right, who does decide which actors get a miniature C-3PO while boring the audience with excessive thanks and overinflated egos? Well, the Academy Awards are voted on each year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a private club of 5,765 individuals. Membership is invitation-only, with said invitations extended by current members. Those current members are very, very old white males, and they extend new memberships to other old white males.

It wasn't easy to find this out -- AMPAS doesn't publicly disclose its membership. But a newspaper did some digging recently and found some insane statistics. Of the members who vote, 77 percent are male. OK, so not a great place to pick up women. Fine. But 54 percent are over 60 and 98 percent are over 40. The average age of the voters is 62.

And oh yeah, 94-freaking-percent are white.

Statistically speaking, this means that, in a pool of 5,765 voters, there is one black woman under 40. You might think, "But these are veterans of the academy! Peers judging their peers!" Not necessarily. Like herpes, membership with AMPAS is for life, even if you've moved on to a completely different career.

It turns out that a mere 19 percent of members have even been nominated for an Oscar, while an even lower 14 percent have actually won, which leaves a two-thirds majority of old white men (some of whom may no longer even work in the business) deciding which actor/movie/screenplay was the best. Holy shit, no wonder Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture.

3 Sainthood

Becoming a saint is a big enough deal that you can get entire cities and holidays named after you, even if the latter just winds up being used as an excuse to get drunk on green beer. So even if you're not Catholic, you know that being a saint means you've stamped your name into the pages of history. Wouldn't it be crazy if people were lighting candles and praying for your guidance 500 years from now?

Well, it actually could happen, if enough time passes and the records get mixed up in just the right way. The process for proclaiming sainthood is, let's just say, kind of lax.

The Process:

Just see St. Josaphat, who turned out to not actually exist (his legend appears to be nothing more than a Christianized version of Buddha). Or St. Philomena, who was a plain old corpse found in a cave in 1802. It just so happened that she was found in a Roman catacomb with a vial of blood, some drawings of arrows and anchors and the inscription "Peace be with thee, Philomena." Which Christians interpreted as the clear sign of a martyr. It wasn't until 1961 that someone asked "Wait ... what?" and she was removed from the saint calendar, on account of (again) no one knowing jack shit about whether she was even a real person.

How can mistakes like that get made? Well, here's how becoming a saint works: First, you die. Second, five or more years later, someone in the Catholic church nominates you for sainthood. Third, a bishop investigates your life. All he needs to know is that your "writings have been found to contain nothing contrary to faith and good morals." If everything is cool, your cause proceeds to a special group of Vatican higher-ups who do nothing but oversee canonizations. They check the bishop's research, verify miracles, make sure you weren't really a devil worshiper, etc. Easy enough.

Except sometimes they're not doing it five years after you die, but 500 years. There's only so much you can discover about people who lived and died before the printing press existed. And we're not talking about historians writing a fact-based report of, say, the guy who got the world's first documented case of porn-induced carpal tunnel syndrome, complete with eyewitnesses, screenshots and incredulous doctors' notes. We're talking about preachers, church members and administrators declaring long-dead people saints. Like, worthy of holy days and for-real-interceding-to-Jesus-on-your-behalf saints.

Which is why you -- yes, you -- could be considered a candidate for sainthood 500 years from now, even if you haven't been to church since Easter 2003 and you totally organized a pro-choice rally on your campus that one time. If future churchgoers find your diary and decide that "I <3 WEEDZ LOL" was an agricultural prayer that miraculously made crops grow, you're in. And that still puts you ahead of those saints we mentioned earlier since, you know, you actually exist.

2 Boxing World Champion

In a boxing movie, the main character is always fighting to be "world champion," or maybe they narrow it down to "heavyweight champion." Either way, there's only one of those belts, and you know that by winning it, he's the best in the world.

But in real life? Quick, name the current world boxing champion. Yeah, didn't think so. Either you can't because you have no idea, or you're a boxing fan and you also can't, because you're still listing names. Because there can be close to a hundred champions at any given moment.

The Process:

Most of us understand that when it comes to boxing, there are weight classes, but what you might not know is that there are 17 separate weight classes, and some of them differ by as little as three pounds. OK, so 17 weight classes. That's 17 world champs then, right? Wrong.

Actually, there are four separate sanctioning bodies in boxing, and all four crown their own 17 world champions. Well, that was up until a fifth body, "The Ring," also started crowning a world champ, which brings the total number of possible world champions at any one time up to a staggering 85-plus. And yes, that's a plus, because some of those slots can themselves be filled by as many as three people at the same time.

And one more thing: Anyone who's watched Rocky III knows something else about boxing champions -- they literally get to pick their fights with whomever they want. There's no tournament where they have to fight the next guy in line on some kind of predetermined schedule. Mickey spells the whole process out for you:

Mickey: They was hand-picked!

Rocky Balboa: Setups?

Mickey: Nah, they wasn't setups. They was good fighters, but they wasn't killers like this guy. He'll knock you to tomorrow, Rock!

Remember how Rocky got his original shot at the belt? Apollo's team picked him because they thought it'd be an easy win. Clubber Lang didn't get his shot until he got Rocky riled up by making sexy talk at his wife. Well, that part of the Rocky mythos was spot on -- all a champion has to do to keep his belt is pick lesser fighters for his matches.

Just ask boxing fans who have waiting for the two best boxers in the world -- Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao -- to fight each other. They've been waiting for two and a half years, with no fight in the foreseeable future. It'd be like if after winning the Super Bowl, you could just spend the next three years setting up games with random mediocre teams.

1 The Nobel Peace Prize

Earlier we mentioned that most of you could probably name more Oscar winners than Nobel Peace Prize winners. That's the comparison that always gets made because, well, the Nobel Peace Prize is the most prestigious award in the world. The other prizes - in Physics, Chemistry, etc. -- go to the brightest members of the species, but the Peace Prize? Hell, that goes to the heroes who are literally saving the world from brutal violence.

There's no way the criteria for this prize is a bunch of bullshit. Let's just end this article right now.

The Process:

In order to get a Nobel Peace Prize, you must first be nominated by a politician, judge, university professor, Nobel prize winner or member of the Nobel committee, who are appointed by the Norwegian parliament. So there's a theme to the nominators, and the theme is "people who've probably never tasted Doritos Locos Tacos." And yes, it's true that the Nobel committee makes the Academy Awards crew look diverse:

But the problem is that in Mr. Nobel's charter for the award, he specifically called for honoring people who are doing the most to promote peace between nations. Present tense. Sounds nice, right? There's one thing missing: time. That is, the time needed to figure out if what the person was doing was successful at all.

Contrast that with the winners of the Nobel Prizes for Physics and Chemistry, whose contributions are specifically required to have "stood the test of time." Which means Dr. Man Who Finally Got Alchemy Down is going have to wait a few decades to get his Chemistry Nobel. Same thing, creator of Quantum Leap. But that guy who came up with the Kony 2012 campaign? Totally eligible for a Peace Prize right now.

And this is why we've had some Peace Prize winners over the years who have been just baffling in retrospect. In 1973, for example, the prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for trying to end the Vietnam War. There was just one small problem: The war was still raging. Cordell Hull got one even though he sent hundreds of Jews to their deaths during the Holocaust because they didn't have correct paperwork. Menachem Begin got one even though he was eventually implicated in a plot to assassinate a German chancellor. And then there's President Obama, whose nomination was turned in 12 days into his presidency -- and he won.

On the other end of the scale we have Gandhi, the guy who liberated an entire nation from oppression without ever lifting a finger in violence. He never won, despite being nominated five separate years. Then he died in 1948, which made him ineligible, because unlike the science awards, a dead person can't win the Peace Prize (you can't be currently doing anything to promote world peace after death, unless you're haunting some dictator's palace). The committee apologized to the human race by awarding the prize to no one that year. Though they may have simply been trying to distract everyone from the fact that Gandhi's black belt was probably bullshit.

James also has a Tumblr, on which he discusses the finer points of social networking, meat-eating and nose-picking.

For more things that aren't that impressive, check out 6 Geniuses Who Saw Their Inventions Go Terribly Wrong. Or discover the The 14 Most Unintentionally Terrifying Statues in the World.

If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out The Filthiest Joke Ever Hidden in a Children's Movie

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