FEATURE — We’d spend hours – my brother and I – bellies down and noses buried in the Guinness Book of Records in 1986. The astronaut on its cover, with his outstretched arm, invited us to believe anything was possible. The pages within confirmed it.

Together we’d marvel over our favorite records, which also happened to be the ones with pictures: the robust McGuire Twins in their matching white cowboy hats on their matching Honda motorcycles; Lee Redmond and her many feet of sprawling gold fingernails; and the tallest man who’d ever lived: the 8ft. 11.1-inch Robert Wadlow.

We just couldn’t believe our eyes. No matter how many times we cracked open the book, we still found the same amazing images. The same amazing records.

Oh, how we longed to be in that book. We wished we could make our pituitary glands malfunction so we could be taller than Robert Wadlow. We wished we had been born twins like the McGuires, instead of two rotten years apart.

However, we did not wish to be Lee Redmond. Our mom said we weren’t allowed. For safety reasons. She told us we’d poke our eyes out – or more likely someone else’s.

In fairness, that was the same summer my brother got terribly concussed from falling head-first off our trampoline. And in fairness, I’d been the one to double bounce him off it.

These Guinness Book memories came flooding back to me earlier this week as I sat on the third row in the children’s section of my local bookstore. I was there to celebrate the launch of a friend’s charming new picture book: The World’s Longest Sock.

The book is a fictional story about two people competing for the record of knitting the world’s longest sock – and about the community they find along the way.

It’s darling. I bought two copies for good measure. And because I’m a sucker for world’s records. Even if they’re fictional.

After the book reading, my author friend told the gathered crowd about the origins of her story. She, too, had always been enamored with world records as a kid and had even been a part of two records as an adult – the “Most People Hula-hooping Simultaneously in One Place” and the “World’s Longest Line of Root Beer Floats” – but her book idea didn’t come from any of that.

Instead, the idea came from a single image in her mind of two long socks hanging off the bottom of the world, born from watching her youngest daughter struggle out of a pair of wet socks on a snowy day. An image that she knew showed the end of a story.

She just didn’t know what story. Because how would the world end up with two long socks hanging off its bottom anyhow? It’s kind of preposterous. And kind of awesome.

It took her years of noodling and writing and drawing to figure it out. And then more years to find an agent, find a publisher and then more drawing and re-writing before the book was born.

Two socks had never had so much thought put into them.

But I loved the idea – and found power from it – that this story had started for my friend at its end. That it had started with a crazy, somewhat unachievable goal. Kind of like the world records she and I had loved as a kid.

The whole thing got me thinking. About the power of the end and about how to harness it.

Dr. Peter Attia, a Stanford trained surgeon and ultra-endurance athlete who now focuses his work on longevity and improved health span, is a big fan of the power of the end.

He regularly asks his patients to picture themselves at ninety, think about what they want to be able to do physically, and then he works backwards with them to create a roadmap to get there. Attia says, “in my practice … we break down and train the movements of the every day life outlining how ‘good’ you need to be today to achieve your goals tomorrow.”

He calls it “backcasting”. And apparently it works. For health. For books. And probably, even for world records. I mean, Lee Redmond didn’t just wake-up one day with twenty-four feet long nails.

I think again of the astronaut beckoning me and my brother from the cover of that Guinness World 1986 book, inviting us to believe. Maybe not so much in the records within, but in the power within ourselves to determine our end.

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