There’s some professional poker playing strategy advice for Texas Hold’em. After a player wins a big hand, they’re less likely to play the next hand unless they have a very strong hand. The logic goes, they’ll be so busy stacking their chips that they won’t be interested in playing unless they have strong hold cards.

I don’t think that idiom applies to me.

I rank the Guinness World Record’s titles I break on a 4-level scale of easy, medium, hard, and impossible. The easy ones I think there may be someone else in this room who could break it right now. Medium is anyone could break this record with some practice. Hard means it usually requires an expert in some category to break. And impossible is I think I may be only one of a handful of people in the world who could make an attempt at this record.

I thought this record was medium. It might be, but it now sku’s toward hard. It took me over a year and a half of on and off practice to break.

The record was for most casino chips stacked in 30 seconds. The previous record was 42. When I started practicing (after honing my fast-twitch muscle responses as the world’s fastest juggler), I could get in the low 30s. After several weeks of practice, I could get more than 35, but not by much.

I finally bucked down with a growth mindset and decided I was going to break it and focused for a few weeks.

I finished with a run of 48 poker chips stacked in 30 seconds with each chip placed 1 at a time from over 10 cm away. I placed the 49th chip as time expired, but it was after 30 seconds had ticked passed so it didn’t count. 5 seconds later (must not fall over for 5 seconds) I had the record.