People are like sand traps. Seriously. Look, just stick with me and we’ll get there.

During my college summers, I worked on the maintenance crew at a private golf course. While I am grateful to the people who helped me get that job, I kind of hated it. I started at 5:30 in the morning, at which time I needed a jacket, and ended around 2 in the afternoon, at which time I was cooked to a nice medium-rare. While driving huge mowers at 3 miles an hour, I would find myself calculating how far I could have driven in the same time at highway speeds; answer: one day of mowing could have gotten me across several state lines.

One assignment I often got was cleaning out the sand traps. This involved driving a small, three-wheeled machine with a rake attached to the back into each sand trap, dragging the rake around a couple of times, and then using a hand rake to clean up the edges. While this was certainly not the worst job I could be assigned (I was once told to bring a shovel to deal with something a coyote left on the approach to the 15th green), raking sand traps got under my skin in its own special way. There are probably many reasons for this. For one thing, it took more energy than some jobs, requiring a lot of hopping on and off the machine and walking around uneven terrain (sometimes with golf balls coming in like meteorites). For another thing, to this day, I have not figured out the trick to getting raked sand to look smooth. My sand traps looked like they had been raked because, you know, they had. But my coworkers would leave their freshly-raked traps looking as if pieces of a Hawaiian beach had been teleported onto the golf course. I still don’t know how.

While we had two of the motorized rakes, it was not uncommon for me to be responsible for all of the traps on the course on a given morning (I believe it averaged out to about three per hole). And for some reason, the last couple of holes were always the hardest. This was partially because holes 17 and 18 had, I think, four or five traps a piece. But I also think it is because humans have a mental block regarding the final push to actually finish a job. I remember that, despite the fact that I had just completed 16 holes’ worth of sand traps (plus the practice area), I was usually convinced that raking out one more trap on hole 17 was going to kill me. And since then, I have found this to be true on countless other projects. I could be hours or days or months into something only to consider quitting my job and hopping a train to Alaska rather than reading through my latest memo draft one more time. It’s the last two percent that gets you.

And the same goes for humans.

Take road trips, for instance. When you are cruising down the highway, the octogenarian doing 55 is a mild annoyance that you whiz by, maybe throwing a quick sideways glance as you pass to confirm that the driver is indeed as ancient as their driving would suggest. But the driver who is only going one or two miles per hour slower than you? This is an annoyance that can stick with you until one of you stops for gas. The two of you have almost equally leaden feet. But that two percent difference in speed is going to haunt you.

Maybe you get lucky, and you both are driving consistently. You accelerate slightly out of your comfort zone, slide into the passing lane, hope there are no radar guns around, and never see that car again. Even then, just catching up to that person and realizing you were going slightly faster probably took longer than blasting around the last semi. But if you are unlucky and one or both of you is not using cruise control . . . well, that’s when your spouse in the passenger seat (glancing at the road between cat naps) starts to wonder if he or she has seen those bumper stickers before. That tiny difference in speed (and slight variances when one of you gets stuck behind a camper while the other aggressively claims the passing lane) means that you and Mr. Two-Percent-Slower get to be buddies until one of you either reaches their destination or is overcome by a craving for fast food.

The problem is even worse when walking or running. At least in a car, you have a nice bubble of personal space. But if you are out for a stroll or a jog and find yourself going 0.2 mph faster than the person ahead of you on the sidewalk . . . you have to start weighing your options.

(1) Continue at your own pace and just deal with the fact that, for about five minutes, you and this other person are going to be workout buddies before awkwardly separating. Yeah, no, too creepy. Especially if you are a guy running slightly faster than some woman. She probably doesn’t think anything of it, but there is the off chance that you will get maced.

(2) Slow down and act casual. Let them think they are just naturally faster; maybe you had a tailwind or something that got you within 30 yards before you tapered off. This can have the downside of making you wonder if the other person thinks you are stalking them. You can enhance this option (and decrease the odds of being maced) by finding a different route and pretending that you were heading that way anyway.

(3) Accelerate to an unnatural speed and blow by. This has the advantage of being the fastest solution. But it comes with downsides. For one, it makes you feel like the other person will see you as needlessly competitive. Also, as in driving, you better hope that you both stay consistent once you do pass this person because if going back and forth on the road is awkward, it is way worse on a sidewalk. If you are running, this might also kill you since, let’s face it, just being out running in the first place made the “old ticker” start to sound like a time bomb. Worse (yes, worse than dying), if you are walking, you have to go into “speed walker” mode, flailing your arms, pumping your feet, and generally sacrificing entirely too much dignity considering you can still be passed by a determined toddler.

Yup, no matter which option you choose, there are enough downsides to make you reconsider ever working out again. Or at least finding running trails with slower people.

But to get more metaphorical, I think that the last two percent can be particularly difficult with personalities. If, for instance, you are having a conversation with someone entirely different from you, it is easy to chalk up disagreements to those personality differences. You can write off their opinion and input my mentally reciting “it takes all kinds” and move on with your life. But when someone is extremely similar to you, things get more difficult. On one hand, maybe you begin to wonder if they are right and you are wrong, which is uncomfortable. But more likely, you just want the other person to see that they are so close to perfection (as defined by you), and if they just admitted you were right on this one issue, they could live a happy, successful life not bothering you anymore. Meanwhile, this other person is playing the same game with you. My brother and I, for instance, are very similar. We can talk for hours about common interests; but we often will hit a minor difference and immediately begin drawing battle lines. Look, I have to get religious for one second here and point out that, despite the fact that I inexplicably measure perfection by myself all the time, we are all catastrophically far off the mark, as defined by Jesus. This can be helpful to remember when embattled against someone who is so close to being your clone that you wonder why they don’t just give in and change those last few segments of DNA.

And, really, it is that last two percent that can be the most useful. It can make us confident that our work is actually complete and not just “good enough” (or point out that it is definitely not good enough). It can teach us patience. It can push our limits. And it can sharpen us as we learn from other human beings. That said, I am curious what proportion of heart attacks take place in the last two percent . . .