Personal success with Deliberate Practice starts with this fundamental understanding: that performance outcomes are not binary—succeed or fail, win or lose. Rather, there are degrees of performance up and down a scale that is unique to every individual. Which means that at its core, Deliberate Practice is the intentional act of competing against your previous best—not against any benchmark set by your peers or anyone else certainly not against minimum standards established to merely clear safety or performance hurdles of the lowest levels. But if we measure, track, and focus on our personal performance during future operations and every task we wish to improve at, we can have fewer days when our performance is sluggish and embarrassing, and many more days when we’re hitting every single bullseye with arrows to spare.