I’m watching an episode of Top Gear. It’s their Polar Special. Two things come to mind:
- MythTV, and PVRs in general, are awesome.
- The guys on Top Gear and MythBusters have dream jobs.
Now, I’m sure these jobs contain a lot of drudgery. Plenty of grind work that isn’t much fun, but has to be done. The hours and hours of planning. Sitting in the back of a small aeroplane while your colleague plays with a car that has 1000 brake-horsepower. Chiselling out hardened concrete from inside a concrete truck. That sort of thing.
But on the plus side, you get to drive a suped-up Toyota to the North Pole, or blow up the aforementioned concrete truck in such a way that you have to be over a mile away to watch it.
Now it’s easy to look at someone else’s job and think “That would be better than my job”, and often you don’t know about all the little hassles and boring parts of a job that looks very glamorous on the surface. Fashion, TV, making movies. All these things are not really as much fun in real life as they might look from the outside. However, having said all that, I’d like to think that I could tolerate the downsides of risking my life, harsh conditions, and plenty of tedium to do something as amazing as driving a car to the North Pole.
In the spirit of the new year, here’s a thought for you: If you, like me, think that you could do something like that, why haven’t you? Sure, these guys are funded by a TV budget. That provides many benefits, but also carries restrictions (such as what the lawyers/insurance people will let you do) that you probably won’t have doing it of your own volition. I certainly haven’t achieved anything as remarkable as any of this, and that’s my own safe, lazy fault.
So, what would you pick for your great adventure? And, more importantly, what are you going to do about achieving it?