After Working 84 Years At the Same Company, This 100-Year-Old Man Set a Guinness World Record
For almost the entire century that he’s been alive, 100-year-old Walter Orthmann has been working at the same company, a Brazil-based entity called RenauxView. Orthmann, who celebrated his 100th birthday on April 19, has been working at RenauxView for 84 years, since January 1938, and was recently awarded a Guinness World Record for his dedication.
“Back in 1938, kids were expected to work to help support the family,” he told Guinness. “As the oldest son of five, my mother took me to find a job at the age of 14.” From there, he found immediate success at RenauxView, which was called Industrias Renaux S.A. when he first started working there. “I was given the opportunity to work as a salesperson,” he said. “I traveled to São Paulo, and in less than one week, I filled the production with orders equivalent of three months of work.”
According to a profile on the Guinness World Records website:
“In the fifties, he started traveling across the country and had the opportunity to meet people from different places and cultures. He fell in love with being constantly on the move and establishing good relationships with clients who became friends.”
Even still, Orthmann considers the Guinness World Record to be his “proudest achievement,” and credits his ability to live in the moment as the driving factor behind his eight-plus decades long tenure.
“I don’t do much planning, nor care much about tomorrow. All I care about is that tomorrow will be another day in which I will wake up, get up, exercise and go to work,” he said. “You need to get busy with the present, not the past or the future. Here and now is what counts.”