The 6 Most Badass Skills You Can Learn in Under a Week

How many times have you watched an action movie and thought to yourself "Man, it must take years of training to be able to pull that off?" Real life police officers, soldiers, and spies have to undergo rigorous training before they get to pilot submarines and shoot people, right?

As it turns out, that's... entirely true. Being a real-life James Bond would take a lifetime of learning and practice. But as it also turns out, there are classes you could take this year that could get you half-way to James Bondhood, many of them taking a week or less of your precious, movie-watching time.

If there's one thing that has become synonymous with James Bond through the years, it's blatant misogyny. A close second, though, would have to be the tragic destruction of fantastically expensive automobiles. In just one afternoon of filming Casino Royale, three stunningly beautiful, brand new Aston Martin DBS's were wrecked, just to film one measly stunt sequence that lasted mere seconds on screen. To put this in perspective, a single Aston Martin costs, at minimum, around four-hundred grand, a figure colloquially known as "more money than you will ever have, ever."

Luckily for us common folk, you can perform crazy stunts in any car, not just laughably expensive luxury sedans. And, with the proper training, you don't even have to total them to do it! But really, if you're not keeping the car, why wouldn't you?

The Coursework:

That proper training is provided at the Rick Seaman Stunt Driving School. Over the three day course, you'll learn everything from Tokyo drifting to speeding backwards through an obstacle course, skills that will prove invaluable if you ever find yourself Tokyo drifting or speeding backwards through an obstacle course.

The class even advertises its ability to teach spinning and sliding either 90, 180, 270 or 360 degrees. Anyone wishing to swerve around in non-quarter-turn intervals is shit out of luck--but if that was your goal, you're probably just a show-off asshole anyway and we hope you never get to take this course.

In addition to the standard two-part stunt driving classes, there is also mention of a special course, called "Anti-Terrorist/VIP Protection," whose very existence is so top-secret that it had to be hidden by placing it slightly further down the page. The exact details in the curriculum are notably left out of the website, likely to keep these undoubtedly hardcore techniques from falling into the wrong hands. The wrong hands, in this case, being defined as "hands that do not contain the several thousand dollars that this course costs."

Every once in a while, spies have to take some time off from murdering and/or sleeping with all kinds of exotic strange to, you know, get some actual spying done. But how do they learn how to use all of that complex spy gadgetry? And more importantly, how can YOU, the consumer, learn how to set up such equipment for purposes that are only tangentially related to watching your hot neighbor undress?

By taking the "Surveillance Advanced" course at Intelligent Training International Limited.

The Coursework:

The lectures are divided into seven days; one for introduction, one for a final exam, one for closing thoughts and the rest is to teach different ways for surreptitiously observing people who really don't want to be observed.

Interestingly enough, each day of borderline-stalker techniques is split up in to two topics: The first is an overview of the material (from your basic "Eavesdropping" through the more complicated "Covert Video Surveillance" to the downright-terrifying "Telephone Interception"), while the second is how each fits in to the local British legal system.

Now, we here at Cracked are far from experts in UK law (or any kind of law, really... or even basic civics), but unless 1984 was actually a documentary, laws regarding secretly spying on your unwilling countrymen couldn't possibly be that complicated. At the very least, the phrase "don't fucking spy on people, bloke" has to be in the law somewhere, right?

Nope.

Oh, and they also offer a course called "Counter-Espionage", presumably aimed both at people who have found out that their friends and co-workers have taken "Advanced Surveillance" and former "Advanced Surveillance" students who have hidden their bugs so well that they can no longer find them.

In The World Is Not Enough, Bond had a secret lock pick built in to a credit card. Despite this amounting to what would have to be the most unwieldy lock pick device in history, you can still find replicas of it on the Internet.

Of course, if you're in a career that involves picking locks, you probably don't want your identity getting out. Luckily, there is a course that lets you learn to pick a lock from the comfort of your own home dressed in the comfort of your own stained boxers, which is probably what you're going to be wearing when you try to drunkenly pick the lock at the Playboy Mansion anyway.

The Coursework:

The Lock Picking School (In A Box!) is more or less exactly what it sounds like: a series of locks, placed in to some kind of shipping container, then mailed to your door. You then use the included basic set of lock picks, or your own personal set, to whittle them open, starting with simple, one-pin locks all the way up to a standard five-pin lock. You know, the kind of lock on your front door. The one that you count on to keep you safe at night.

What's that you say? You don't have any lock picks?

That's cool, you can buy those, too! That's right, despite the fact that these picks are built with one and only one purpose (namely, to pick locks, although they would probably make decent shanks in a pinch also), the possession of picks and wrenches is legal in most places, especially if you can prove you're not planning on stealing anything with them. Go ahead, check that link if you don't believe us. Yeah, that's Wikipedia, homes. Wikipedia ain't never lied.