Choosing your own world record

One thing that caught my attention at Wimbledon a while ago was John Isner^[1]Who you might remember from the world’s longest tennis professional tennis match back in 2010 breaking the record for number of aces served (winning the point without his opponent being able to return the serve) in the men’s ATP tour (top-flight men’s tennis). I particularly enjoyed the fact that despite knocking over 24 aces in the match and gaining this world record, he didn’t actually win the match – which was of course the aim that all of those aces were supposedly in aid of.

I also liked the way that he talked about it beforehand:

“Once I hit that number, whatever, not going to make an announcement or anything, but I’ll know I have the record and it will be pretty cool.”

“It’s not going to put me in the Hall of Fame or anything like that, because that’s not me. But I will be the all-time leader. I’ll keep playing, keep adding to my total.”

He’s clearly keeping track of it, and thinking it would be “cool”, without it being an end-point, which feels like a nice sort of goal to have. It’s also worth pointing out that it’s a goal that he seems to be “made for” – at a height of six foot and 10 inches, he can not only hit his serves fast, he can hit them down at a sharper angle which means that they will bounce up to an awkward height for his opponents. To reach this record he’s started from his natural advantages but he’s also had to work not only on his serving but his entire game so that he got into the ATP tour and won enough games to progress in tournaments and have more games to build up his total.

It would have been easy for him to have already concluded that he’s not the best tennis player, and to have given up by now  – much like how many of us stop or restrict our creative pursuits because we feel we’re not doing well enough. But if we continue, we might have the chance to find the “world record” unique to us. There are so many different types of creativity and different subjects to create art about, that somewhere there probably is a combination of things that you want to build up to that is unique to you. Maybe finding a unique “record”^[2]For more inspiration about unusual areas, you could take inspiration from obscure Netflix categories which include “Cerebral Foreign Dramas from the 1950s”, “Critically-acclaimed Independent … Continue reading for yourself can help give you the push you need to keep going and develop not only one specific skill, but lots of creative skills around it.

I’m still looking for my own personal world record. Maybe it’s to do with not only making people who aren’t scientists laugh at the Schrodinger Equation, but want to study to find out more about it. Or helping one of my science comedy troupe, The Variables, to go on to a career in comedy. Perhaps the secret is to keep doing what I’m doing and find smaller “records” along the way – like reaching 10 years of Variables shows, keeping up a streak of getting at least one joke into a series of Breaking the News (managed 3 series in a row so far!), or even keeping fortnightly blog posts going for a year. I’m certainly going to try for that last one! I’ll keep searching for a longer goal, hoping that looking for my own personal record will help me keep motivated and creative.