Getting to walk on the moon or mars.
Biggest requirement is having the right skills/education at exactly the right time. In theory just about anybody could do it. But in practice it takes alot of skill, hard work, AND luck.
The Dalai Lama has stated that to avoid this very issue he won’t reincarnate.
My vote is with this one. Astronaut is a hard job to get but moonwalker is orders of magnitude harder without watching a MJ video.
Sure, in practice, but then, every job has a lot of requirements in practice that aren’t officially listed. In practice, the Pope has to be not only Catholic, but a cardinal, and there aren’t too many of those at all. I suspect that if you look at the qualifications folks have historically entered the Supreme Court with, that there are a heck of a lot more people with those qualifications than there are cardinals.
To become Pope, however, you’ve got to be Catholic - which rules out about 5 and a half billion people plus those who aren’t interested in becoming priests and/or higher ranks. But I do agree with you regarding the rest of what you said. It must take a lot of patience and faith (and luck? There have only been 264 Popes since St Peter).
Oh, and then there were those two guys…who once…for 20 minutes…did something or another 
“Screw you guys, I’m going [del]home[/del] to Nirvana.”
Leader of the Freemasons? or skull and bones
Does lama + antilama = total conversion to energy? What happens if you stick them in the LHC?
how about we calculate if the total amount of energy spent on wars caused by antipopes is more than the amount you would get by annihilating their mass in direct energy conversion.
it could be the worlds most dense energy source is actually anti-popes, not anti-matter.
I assume the conversion of mass to energy will cause enlightenment.
Assuming we exclude ‘jobs’ like King or Queen, which you have to inherit by birth (or by killing off the other claimants, like Henry IV & Edward IV of England, for example).
Beyond that, I would suggest that the hardest job to get is the one that requires the approval of the most people. Which I would say is being elected as President of the United States. That requires winning a plurality of approximately 130 million voters.
Pope requires winning 2/3rds majority of about 120 Cardinals, or about 81 votes. Not that big a group to beg, bribe, or intimidate. (And often, they are people you helped into their office. The current pope Benedict was Vatican Secretary of State for many years; about half the voting Cardinals owed their appointment to him.)
China has a much higher number of voters, but they directly vote only for local leaders. National leaders come from the National Peoples Congress (3000 delegates), but they usually rubber stamp the candidate from the 6-9 person Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party.
It’s not necessary to win a plurality of the popular vote to become president of the US. Witness the 2000 election where the loser had the most votes. And it was not the first time that has happened. The US president actually just has to win a majority of the Electoral College, which is composed of 538 electors.
India has more voters than the US, but its president is not elected by direct vote, either.
By your criterion, the answer is the country with direct election of its head of state/government that has the largest population. I don’t know which it is, and it’s too late for me to do the research to find out.
India?
Actually, I have no idea how you get elected to be Indian Prime Minister, but they are at least a democracy.
Yes, the average is less that eight years overall, but if you only count since 1800 the average is more like 14.
When I was living in Nepal years ago, they (I’m not really sure who “they” were) chose a “Living God.” That seems like a hard gig.
The US is in practice, a direct election – on the ballot, it gave Barak Obama & John McCain as choices, not the electors from the states. The Electoral College is just a relict of the ‘Great Compromise’ of the 1780’s, intended to protect the slave states. There have only been a couple of elections where it has really effected the results.
[QUOTE=SanVito]
Actually, I have no idea how you get elected to be Indian Prime Minister, but they are at least a democracy.
[/QUOTE]
They are a Parlimentary democracy, so people vote for hundreds of local legislators. Then those legislators elect a Prime Minister. So basically, the party that wins a majority of the local races (or can form a coalition with other parties) chooses the Prime Minister.