From the moment they start school, people are told that hard work is the key to success and also “try and try until you succeed”. So a majority of spend their lives working hard and harder, juggling numerous things at a time but still struggling to make a difference in their professional lives.

When we look at the HR landscape, a number of managers are struggling with the everyday, trying to tick a list of boxes for every month of the year. These include engagement activities, team meetings, evaluations, appraisals, hiring, firing and so on. However, the managers who go on to make a difference in the way a company works are the ones who take on a certain project and drive it to completion with focused effort. A very interesting example of this dedication is Bollywood star Aamir Khan, who during his career so far has shown singular dedication to his projects, focusing on doing a small number of projects but doing them well. With every project, he raises the bar and makes new milestones with his movies.

Starting out with the critically acclaimed Taare Zameen Par to Ghajini which became the highest grossing movie in 2008, he broke this record with his next movie 3 Idiots, the highest grossing movie in Bollywood history with earnings of Rs 200 crore. Then came his next movie, Dhoom 3, which became a cult earner, crossing the Rs 500-crore mark for the first time in Hindi movies. His latest movie PK has done even better and within four weeks of its release earned revenues of Rs 600 crore.

In the last 15 years, every project of Aamir Khan has shown even better results than the last and become commercially and critically successful across all platforms. However, his very early experiments with Hindi cinema were not as successful. Aamir’s journey shows his experiments and his experiences with movies both good and bad. His first 15 years of work might have established him as a good actor, but the movies felt half-baked as he worked on multiple projects concurrently. Aamir then changed track and started doing only one or two movies per year. This was a very different from all other mainstream actors. And with every new project, the quality of his work improved and the milestones lined up on their own.

This is a lesson for all things in life. It should be about doing the task at hand to the best of one’s capability, rather than trying to just do mediocre work across many fields or projects. With the changing business environment, this lesson holds even more importance for the HR profession. The boundaries of life and work are changing and it is on HR professionals to make a difference with their work in the lives of all employees within the organization. They can do this by concentrating on quality work, rather than merely on quantity.