We’ve all been there—trying to get something done while everyone else just won’t listen. It’s beyond frustrating, and sometimes, you just hit that breaking point where you think, “Enough is enough, I’ll handle it myself!”
Redditors came together to share their favorite iconic moments when people took charge and made things happen. Scroll down to read these incredible stories and don’t forget to upvote your favorites!
Maybe not in history, but in my own life it’s an example that still makes me smile.
I’m disabled (wear a leg brace on my right leg and use elbow crutches). In second grade we were playing Capture the Flag, and somehow I’d gotten to the circle where the flag was on the opposing side. No one bothered to guard me, or even watch the flag. I stuffed the flag in my pocket and scooted as fast as I could past the line to safety. A few seconds later confusion erupted. All eyes on me, I slowly pulled the long red piece of fabric out of my pocket with the flourish of a magician pulling out a silk handkerchief. My entire team erupted in cheers. I was the hero of the day. fullmetaldreamboat ADVERTISEMENT
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ADVERTISEMENT I don't know if this fits, but I feel like it deserves an honorabl mention. Theresa Kachindamoto, the paramount chief of the Dedza District in Malawi:
She is renowned for her courageous efforts to eradicate child marriage in her community. Since taking office, she has dissolved over 3,500 child marriages, sending each of those children back to school.
Kachindamoto’s forceful action in dissolving child marriages and insisting on education for both girls and boys has been met with both praise and criticism. **Despite receiving death threats and backlash** from some community members, she has remained committed to her cause. She is now lobbying the government to increase the marriageable age to 21.
In a country with one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world, Kachindamoto’s efforts have made a significant difference. According to reports, she has stopped around 850 child marriages in just three years, and over 300 in a single month. Her work has inspired a community-wide shift towards prioritizing education and protecting children’s rights. AmettOmega ADVERTISEMENT
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In 1940 Polish army officer and Polish resistance soldier Witold Pilecki volunteered to be captured by the German occupier and be placed in Auschwitz concentration camp in order to infiltrate it. He successfully organized a resistance movement inside, collected a lot of intel on Nazi atrocities, and escaped it in 1943. In 1944 he fought in the Warsaw Uprising.
He didn't accept the Soviet occupation of Poland and remained loyal to the Polish government-in-exile (based in London). He returned to Poland after the war in 1945 to report on the situation there. Sadly, he was arrested in 1947 by Communist Poland's secret police, tortured and executed in 1948. JarasM ADVERTISEMENT Linus Torvalds is really an interesting person. After creating Linux, the system running on most servers today, he also made Git purely motivated by dissatisfaction with the then available versioning programs. And it became not only the versioning tool for Linux developers (his goal), but also the most popular versioning tool being used by software companies and developers today. l86rj The group of elderly people who tunneled under the Berlin Wall because they got told to f**k off.
I recall this exhibit from the Checkpoint Charlie museum about 20 years ago. There was a group of elderly Germans who lived on the east side of the wall, and quite near it. They sought help from someone who ran escape routes to the west and did a lot of tunneling. He basically told them “nah, you’re too old and useless to help me.”
They were not having it.
They set out to make their own tunnel. They devised their own system of signals and codes with the planting of flowers. Each person had a role, from digging to dirt dispersal to manning the planting signals. And the best part is that they made their tunnel tall enough so they could all walk through instead of having to crawl as would have been the case with the other guy’s tunnel. HonoriaG ADVERTISEMENT
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Well he probably didn't say "f**k it," but Georges Lemaitre was a Belgian priest/astronomer who basically came up with what is now known as the "Big Bang Theory." He was at the famous (at least for physicists) 1927 Solvay conference, and while he was still fresh off getting his PhD, he managed to get to talk to Einstein about his idea of an expanding universe that started with a singularity.
He was this young upstart kid among some of the greatest minds of the age (Marie Curie, Neils Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac) and Einstein was dismissive of his notion, saying “from the point of view of Physics this seems to me abominable”.
Lemaitre was right, of course, and years later Einstein had to admit that he was wrong. gogojack ADVERTISEMENT
In 1981, in the west of Ireland, a local priest decided that his town needed an airport. So he built one. With no money and no planning permission. It's now the West of Ireland's international airport https://www.rte.ie/archives/2016/0215/768106-knock-airport/. DD_irl_irl
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ADVERTISEMENT Horacio Pagani while working at Lamborghini suggested that they should buy an autoclave because it would allow them to produce professional lightweight carbon car bodies, Lamborghini refused, so Horacio left Lamborghini, took a bank loan and bought the machine himself. He started making the bodies himself and selling them to other automakers, including Lamborghini. After some time in 1992, Horacio Pagani founded Pagani Automobili and began designing and producing his own cars. Skoopy859 I know she isn't famous but my 77 year old mum driving herself to hospital in March with bacterial pneumonia and Covid pneumonia at the same time because she couldn't talk to call anyone in the family or the ambulance is a pretty good "Fk it, I will do it myself. The first 2 days in hospital. the doctors and nurses didn't know whether she would survive.*
Oh, you wanted a famous one? The Antarctic scientist doctor who operated on himself for appendicitis because there was no time to get a rescue operation done and he was the only doctor in the whole station. That was pretty awesome.
EDIT: *she did, I stayed with her most of July and August this year. Adventurous_Bag9122 ADVERTISEMENT
Mariya Oktyabrskaya.
After her husband was killed fighting Nazis in 1941, Oktyabrskaya sold her possessions to donate a tank for the war effort, and requested that she be allowed to drive it. She received and was trained to drive and fix a T-34 medium tank, which she named "Fighting Girlfriend" ("Боевая подруга"). Oktyabrskaya proved her ability and bravery in battle, and was promoted to the rank of sergeant. After she died of wounds from battle in 1944, she was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union's highest honor for bravery during combat. She was the first female tank driver to be awarded the title. IAmAQuantumMechanic ADVERTISEMENT Well, I got tired of waiting on contractors to give me a bid on building my house. It was either super expensive or a year out, so I said, "f*** it, I'll do it myself."
And I did. tenderbuck Leonid Rogozov diagnosed himself with an acute appendicitis while on an expedition in Antarctica in 1961. Being the only doctor on the f*****g continent he performed an appendicectomy on himself. That is to say he cut open his own stomach, took out his intestines, removed the inflamed appendix, put the rest of his intestines back, sutured himself and went about his day like a boss. jamajikhan That time when this guy’s son was born with adrenoleukodystrophy, an incurable and awful disease. All of the doctors him and his wife spoke to said he was going to live a short and awful life. So they studied neuro chemistry and developed their own treatment and started to modestly fund research.
Their treatment was effective at dramatically slowing the progression of the disease, but unfortunately, their son was pretty far along by the time they worked it out.
[Here’s a bit about them.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto,_Michaela,_and_Lorenzo_Odone). via-con-dios-kemosab ADVERTISEMENT One of the biggest “f*** it, I’ll do it myself moments was Magellan deciding to sail around the world. After Portugal shut him down, he went to Spain, got support, and his crew became the first to circumnavigate the globe. Even though he didn’t make it, they proved the Earth was round and opened up global trade routes. Fragrant-Grab-4448
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Pedro Cerrano.
“F**k you Jobu, I do it myself”. And he hit a home run, carrying his bat with him around the bases to send the Cleveland Indians to the playoffs. 1988(?) season, one of the greatest pennant runs in history. throwgotta Dashrath Manjhi, the “Mountain Man,” was a laborer from a village in Bihar, who undertook an extraordinary journey to carve a path through a treacherous mountain after his wife’s tragic death in 1959. Falguni Devi died due to the inefficiency of government services; the nearest clinic was 70 kilometers away, and she could not receive timely medical attention after falling while bringing him lunch. Frustrated by the lack of action from authorities, who ignored the community’s needs, Manjhi decided to take matters into his own hands. Over 22 years, using only basic tools, he single-handedly created a 360-foot-long road that reduced travel distance for villagers significantly. Despite facing ridicule and threats from local officials, his determination inspired others to join him. In 1982, he completed the path, which ultimately benefited not just his village but also surrounding areas. mokaushik ADVERTISEMENT U.S. Army Colonel Lewis Millet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Millett
That crazy m***********s entire career was one long string of Plot Armor stories! He led so many bayonet charges in Korea that he had to be given a direct order to **stop** even though every one of them was a huge success. Drove away an on fire truck full of ammo to save his unit. And he technically earned the Medal of Honor more than once!
Here’s a more humorous summary of his life if you’re interested:
https://youtu.be/-aivkapXU14. Rose-Red-Witch My friend. A Realtor with genius level intellect while in her first year in university. She had a client that wanted to see a unit in a building. My friend called the front desk which was also building management dozens of times before anyone answered. The woman who answered the phone was very nasty and bad at her job.
My friends boyfriend was a software engineer. So my friend and her boyfriend spent a few days working on an automated system that fully replaced the unprofessional woman. She reached out to the building owner, pitched the system, woman was fired immediately, my friend gained access to the unit. Kingsta8 ADVERTISEMENT Sir Isaac Newton thought bisecting polygons with insanely high numbers of sides (e.g. 2^62 sides) was inefficient at calculating pi, so he used his (and Leibniz's) newly invented calculus to drastically increase the efficiency of calculating pi to an arbitrary number of decimal places. hardyhaha_27 Greg Jennings putting da team on his back with a broken leg. GoOnBud China building their own space station after being rejected by USA from cooperation in International Space Station. Difficult-Ad2414