As I begin to write this, the question that is being asked is whether Aamir Khan's Dangal will break PK's box office record or not? Around the same time 2 years back the question that was being asked was whether PK will eventually break the box office record of Dhoom 3?
A year before that the question was whether Dhoom 3 will break PK's record?
Do you notice the pattern between these questions? Yes, Aamir Khan playing the lead role is a definite no brainer! But the important thing to notice is that each of Aamir Khan's new movie gets compared with his own previous movie. I repeat.
His own previous movie!
By the time you actually read this article, Dangal might have actually broken PK's record!
With Dangal, Aamir has not only established himself as one of the most reliable actors of this industry but has actually redefined how we measure success or rather how we compare success.
With his new movie, I feel Aamir Khan has reached the pinnacle of his acting career.
It won't surprise me if I cut and paste the same line for Aamir Khan the next year and the next...
It is a bit like Virat Kohli who has become such a great cricketer and his records are so mind numbing that we are forced to compare Virat Kohli with only Virat Kohli just like we used to compare Mahendra Singh Dhoni as a finisher with Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the finisher we know through his records over time.
For any professional performer, the highest point of his career is achieved when he starts becoming a 'misaal', a rallying point about the highest achievement in his field. The only competition a professional then has is with himself. It is at once the most gratifying and yet a very vulnerable prospect to be in. You are expected to deliver every time you make the next move. Some players like Sachin Tendulkar and Virat Kohli and some film stars like Aamir Khan excel when they are put in such a position.
However this might not always happen. We all know the story of a 17 year old kid who slammed a 37 ball hundred in 1996 tried replicating it in each of his next innings. (He played 400 ODIs by the way) But he could never again emulate the same amount of success that he did when he first batted. We know this kid by the name Shahid Afridi and he too is a 'misal', a rallying point when it comes to talking about 'inconsistency'.
Perhaps it is a natural human tendency to expect more, "Yeh Dil always Mange More!" The burden of expectations is what separate a successful professional and excellent professional. With the work which Aamir Khan and Virat Kohli are producing right now in their respective careers, it appears that they are not chasing success but rather in pursuit of Excellence, as one of Aamir's famous character, Phunsuk Wangdu says in 3 Idiots.
And perhaps the dream and goal of every individual and every Institute is to reach a level where comparison with the contemporaries ceases to exist but the comparison becomes one with their previous work.
In trying to beat their own records, these individuals have widened the horizon of human excellence and as we know the beauty of Horizon is that a new one appears every time we go past the existing one.
I leave you here with a question - What should be our goal to become successful to stay successful?
Can our each next step be better than the previous one? Can our each new day be more productive than the previous one? Can each new moment of your life be more valuable than your previous one?
Can our each new Year be better that the last?
If we actually make this possible then I believe we shall have lived the most productive versions of our life.
As Robin Sharma wrote in one of his books, "At the end of my life I don't want to be like a glittering lamp which gets extinguished with the oil still inside. I want to be like a flame, burning the brightest till its alive and leaving behind no unsued oil."
I write this to you at a time when I know many of the new year resolutions thay we took a week back have vanished.
But starting today, we still have more than 350 days to make this year the best year of our life yet.
With all sincerity I pray to the universe to make us all monomaniacally focused
on making 2017 our best year yet.
Let us approach every decision that we make in this new year with the timing and confidence of Virat Kohli and the perfection of Aamir Khan.
Happy 2017.
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