THE 99% THERE PROBLEM

Why is it so hard to adapt to change, or to make something new work? Because sometimes we're looking at things just 1% wrong.

- JASON FEIFER

We are in a moment of great change, and that change has surely come for you. Perhaps you've been forced to adapt to the unpredictable. Or you've pivoted. Or released a new product or service. I'm going to guess that, in some way, you feel like these changes have been equal parts success and failure-that something is working very well, but you aren't fully happy or satisfied. Maybe a small wellspring of panic is brewing.

Why?

I'll tell you my theory: It's because you're 99% there. And that last 1% hurts the most.

This is like hiking a mountain with a pebble in your shoe: It doesn't really matter if your legs are strong enough to conquer the incline, or if your shoes grip the earth tightly enough, because if the tiniest, most infinitesimal part of that rock formation ends up underneath your heel, it can bring you to a halt. You must stop, take off your shoe, and locate that tiny part.

Sometimes, the most impactful part of a journey is also the smallest part.

So how can you locate it? And how can you make it better?

To start, you need to understand what I call the "99% There" problem. It's time to back up.

WHEN MILEY CYRUS TWERKED at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, prudes were aghast. "We're on a moral downward spiral," conservative radio host Laura Ingraham told her listeners at the time. "What you're hearing is the end of the culture." But in truth, Ingraham was just echoing a centuries-old complaint: A new dance reaches mainstream culture, and traditionalists use it as a stand-in for everything they find objectionable about their own fading relevance. It famously happened with jazz and rock and roll-but the mother of all dance scandals, and arguably the very first true dance-inspired crisis, was the waltz.