If you're having trouble solving a problem, you might be wrong about 1% of things

This article is excerpted from the new book Build for Tomorrow.

We are in a great moment, and this change has surely arrived for you. Maybe you had to adapt to the unpredictable. Or you pivoted. Or published a service or. I'm going to assume that in some way you feel like these changes have been both a success and a failure - that something is working very well, but you're not completely happy or satisfied. Perhaps a small source 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.

It's like hiking in the mountains with a pebble in your shoe: it doesn't matter if your legs are strong enough to conquer the slope, or if your shoes have enough grip on the ground, because if the smaller, the more infinitesimal part of this rock formation is found under your heel, it can stop you. You have to stop, take off your shoe and locate this small part.

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Sometimes the biggest part of a trip is also the smallest.

So how can you locate it? And how can you improve it?

To begin with, you need to understand what I call the "99% problem here". It's time to save.

Image credit: Nicolás Ortega

When Miley Cyrus twerked at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, prudes were appalled. “We are in a downward moral spiral,” conservative radio host Laura Ingraham told her listeners at the time. "What you hear is the end of culture." But in truth, Ingraham was only echoing a centuries-old complaint: a new culture is reaching mainstream culture, and traditionalists are using it as a substitute for whatever they find objectionable to their own waning relevance. . It happened with jazz and rock and roll, but the mother of all dance scandals, and arguably the very first real dance-inspired crisis, was the waltz.

In the early 1800s, European society was absolutely outraged by the waltz. London's The Times, for example, called it a "lewd presentation" for "harlots and adulterers". British Romantic poet Lord Byron wrote a nearly 2,000-word poem about how much he hated dancing. A society man named Theodore Hook – who, on a completely unrelated note, is considered the inventor of the picture postcard – so despised the waltz that he engaged in a duel over it with a military general waltz lover. They each shot once and called it a day.

The antivalseurs of the time talked a lot about the unhealthiness of the dance and the fact that the human body was not made to support all these rotations. A 19th century doctor claimed that habitual dancing would take years off your life - calculating that the average lifespan of a waltzer was 37 years for a man and 25 years for a woman. In a way, this was nothing new: Victorian doctors had also warned that romances could make women infertile, and in the 1800s doctors warned of a medical condition called " bicycle face" - a permanent disfigurement caused by the strain of trying to keep the bicycle in balance.

But curiously, doctors in the late 1800s were right about the waltz: in fact, it was bad for people's health.

The doctors got the reason wrong.

Doctors noted that after waltzing, some people got sick. "Dancers have reportedly developed bronchitis and even pneumonia after waltzing. This has led some doctors to blame the dance itself as the cause," says Mark Knowles, author of The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances. . , which is on the faculty of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Therefore, doctors believed that the dance itself was the problem. Our bodies weren't built to withstand so many twists and touches.

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But here's what those doctors didn't take into account, according to Knowles: The dance took place in a ballroom with no ventilation, because the buildings at the time didn't were not designed for good air circulation. Things were even worse in winter, when windows and doors were closed. Candles or gas lamps lit the room, which released harmful chemicals into the air. The floor was a bit...