Thoughts on being a world record holder
I recently became a world record holder. A bona fide Guinness World Record with a certificate and everything.
The record is for the world’s smallest deck of playing cards.
I made the smallest playing cards in the worldI’ve written before about where the idea came from and how I did it.
I didn’t do it to make money and it was quite a lot of work. But I thought it would be fun (and it was), and it’s a good publicity stunt for my playing card company Cartesian Cards. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how much attention the project has attracted.
Admittedly it’s not the fastest marathon time or anything like that, but I must say it feels pretty cool to say I’m a world record holder.
One of the very first books I rememberI grew up watching Roy Castle on the telly and occasionally getting the hardback Guinness Book of Records for Christmas, but I’d never even thought about being a world record holder myself before I embarked on this project a few months ago.
There are no guarantees that I’ll end up in the printed book, since there are more records than would all fit, but it is possible and that would be amazing.
When I tell people about my record, without fail, everyone's eyes light up. There still seems to be a very strong cultural resonance with the idea of being a world record holder. There’s something nice about the good honest joy of pouring over world records from the ridiculous to the sublime.
I think it’s helped by the fact that Guinness World Records have done such a good job of remaining the arbiter of all things superlative.
For my particular record, I think people would still have found the diminutive playing cards cute, but they wouldn’t have quite had the same impact if they hadn’t been officially the smallest playing cards in the world.
World’s Strongest Man
Whatever field you’re in, there’s something special about receiving the ultimate accolade of being classed as a world record holder.
Take Eddie Hall, the World’s Strongest Man 2017 and deadlift world record holder.
He’s become a bit of a social media celebrity. A lot of that is to do with the man himself — he’s very engaging and clearly has a good stage presence — but I believe his personal brand is built upon the foundation that the world’s strongest man title and other records have given him.
Just being a very strong man doesn’t quite have the same caché, and makes for a less compelling YouTube video title. Second place is the first loser as they say.
There’s obviously some genetic component to Eddie Hall’s success, but then there’s also an incredible amount of physical and mental effort that he’s put in over many years to get where he has.
It’s all the more impressive because his chosen discipline is so universal. Literally every human being has strength. He’s up against almost eight billion other people.
In the scale of human achievement, the top ten strongest men in the world are almost imperceptibly close in strength to each other. And yet, the title bestowed upon the strongest man elevates him up to a whole new level.
Find your niche
So my world record, although not as impressive as Eddie Hall’s, has been a lot of fun and has generated some great interest.
A playing card museum in Sweden bought some of the smallest cards, and I just had an email from the acquisition team at Ripley’s Believe it or Not.
A million people run a marathon each year. Being the best of all of them is basically impossible.
On the other hand, almost no one has tried to make the world’s smallest playing cards.
We can’t all be Eddie Hall or Tigst Assefa. But we can find our little niche and try and conquer it.
Next for me is the world’s largest playing cards!
What are you making?
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