There are three Guinness World Records certificates of participation hanging on my wall, all of them from Hong Kong. But only one of them are worth talking about because I was part of the organizing committee. I was just part of a crowd for the other two. It’s not what you achieve, it’s what you learned from the process of achieving it that matters.
On September 21, 2018, a dozen good friends and I managed to muster 1,661 members of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology to put their hand prints on a giant canvas to form the shape of four conjoined hearts. At first, the adjudicator was reluctant to recognize what we had as a distinct shape, but he eventually saw it our way after a lot of convincing by John, our lead organizer.
What did I do? I was a good friend of John’s and worked closely with him on many matters in the students’ union, so he asked me to join the committee to consult. I consulted on the logistics of moving 1,600 people through a small space within 60 minutes, I consulted on how to convince each of the 22 university departments involved to do their bit, and I consulted on their pitch package to the university’s governing body to get their support on the attempt.
Back in early 2018, the university’s student body was going through a rough patch of student politics and distrust of the administration’s distribution of university bed spaces. It was in need of something positive to bring everyone better together. The entirely student-run committee was formed with the idea of coming up with a record we could feasibly break and get it done.
We spent at least two weeks just flipping through Guinness World Records in the library to shortlist a number of ideas to put through several rounds of votes. We had a meagre budget, so we also had to figure out how much each of the top picks cost and picked the cheapest one.
By the time we were about to begin the attempt, we had spent the entire budget. We knew we only had one shot. We also wanted the attempt to help establish the first student-initiated scholarship in the university called the Dream Chaser Scholarship Fund. It offers funding to students from single-parent families, orphans, visible minority, new immigrants, among other difficult situations.
It was a lesson in cutting through a large institution’s red tape, holding out hope that enough people will show up, and convincing different people to do the same thing for different reasons. Would I do it again? Probably not. Once is enough, and when you get a third certificate on the wall a fourth doesn’t have the same novelty.
