Acquiring the official Guinness World Record title is still high on the bucket list of many thousands of people. We can learn about this every single day from our records managers, who process tens of thousands of record requests every year. With the easing of restrictions due to the coronavirus epidemic, all of this only intensified. And although it is indeed a lot of work to manage the demands, we were also able to make sure that both the record categories and the personalities of our record holders have become more and more diverse. I hope you will also notice while reading Guinness World Records 2023 that we tried to present the world of records in its most varied and diverse form. Everyone can find a record that is interesting to them, regardless of age, gender, nationality, religion, or ability. For this purpose, we launched our record project for children in 2022, in which we devised various challenges specifically for those younger than 16 (p. 8-9). In order to provide people with various physical or mental disabilities the opportunity to set records, we developed a disability category system. In addition to all this, we are proud to have signed partnership agreements with organizations such as the British Sports Association for Small People (DSAuk) or the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB). further expanding the possibilities for breaking the record.

In the last 12 months, there has been a significant increase in the number of requests for records in which the applicants aimed to exceed the limits of our planet. That's why we created the theme of missions in this year's edition, which we dedicated entirely to outer space. The starting gun went off, and a completely new form of the space race began, where civilians "fight each other" in a wide variety of fields, taking advantage of the opportunities of commercial space flight. We have to admit that these types of record decisions are not accessible to ordinary people, but they undoubtedly inspire humanity to try to expand the limits of its abilities as much as possible.