 Hi Jeff, once again here and I'm back with milestone card explainer video number three. So I'm going to get my cards, here they are, and give them a bit of a shuffle. Run all over the place and what have we got here? Okay today we beat our personal best. We love competing with ourselves and selling new standards, we never would have believed it and I've got the hashtag I've raised the bar. So why is beating our personal best a milestone in a team's growth towards team mastery? Well all of the great teams that I've seen and being part of are quite competitive and that's not just sports teams but competition has upsides and downsides and I've very rarely seen a team within an organization that can look at another team in the organization and realistically compare and compete against them because they're doing different things, they have different skill sets, different domains, different problems and so actually comparing them and you've heard the stories of teams comparing velocity against each other it always ends in in a disaster. So the best teams don't really compare themselves to their colleagues or even to teams in other organizations because there are too many variables outside of their scope of control but they can still be competitive because they compete against themselves. So they're constantly resetting the bar of their own high standards and that's a great habit to get into. I have seen some healthy inter-organizational competition where team A sees team B doing something better and they think okay then now we can improve and we can raise the bar and that that sort of internal competition does help raise the overall levels I have seen that. I've seen more dysfunctional behaviors as a result of internal competition but it can be possible. Competition also has some other downsides if it's tied to rewards and now I tell the story of Sergei Bubka the world record Paul Volta who got an incentive a financial bonus from his sponsor every time he broke the world record and so he was only ever really incentivized to break the world record by a little bit so that he could get another bonus the next time he broke it and that's that's dysfunctional behavior that's gaming the system and great teams don't want rewards for beating their personal best because the reward is the intrinsic feeling of satisfaction and completion that they get by doing it. So what can you do well the first thing I'd recommend you to do is find out what's important to you as a team find out what drives you as a team what you want to get better at as a team and then gather some data about it get benchmark where you are right now whether it's bugs in production whether it's uh response times whatever it is find some data about it so you know what you're starting from then set yourself a target set yourself a goal to get better you don't have to get 10% better or 20% better or 10 seconds quicker just get better then celebrate when you get there uh and go again now there are a few things that you can do to help you along the way if you make your targets visible you're more likely to want to stick to them and to beat them so make them publicly visible tell people what you're doing verbalize what you're doing tell someone that you care about that you're going for this target again it will increase your sense of attachment and sense of wanting to make it happen and visualize having made it you know sports stars do this all the time they visualize the success so they know what they're going to do they know that feeling they're attached to that successful outcome give it a go and see if it helps your team go from good to great