There is no score that can be higher than someone correctly answering all the questions on a given school test, which equates to a score of 100, or 100%. There is no higher achievement in your life work than performing your work at such a high level that this work is recognized by your peers as outstanding, or a virtual perfection. Although many people believe that a score of 98% is almost the same as 100%, it is and it isn't. A score of 98% cannot be the same or the equivalent to 100%, because there is room for improvement on the lower score, therefore there is error, and any error by definition means an achievement of less than 100%, and consequently is less than perfect. Yet we hear day by day, that the pursuit of perfection or to be a perfectionist, is somehow an Achilles heel and to be avoided at all costs. While there is some truth that even a great virtue, taken to an extreme, can become a flaw or even a vice, the desire to do your utmost, the desire for accuracy, correctness, and rightness, is well worth pursuing and is almost always a cardinal virtue of any great discovery or accomplishment made by man. The pursuit of perfection is why mankind was able to fly, orbit, and to land a spacecraft onto the moon and later to return our astronauts safely back to earth, because without the scientific pursuit of excellence which gave no quarter to mistakes or substandard reasoning, the result could quite easily have been disastrous.
Then there is the fact that our Creator is perfection itself, and as his created beings in His image, we have an innate desire to be perfect, just as a child has an inborn desire to please his father. In Matthew 5:48 we read: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." At first glance this seems to be a rather unfair burden to place upon a mere human, but everything is indeed possible in Christ, or we would not be instructed to become perfect. The way of perfection, is however, a path not often trod by those of a material inclination, and this pursuit can only be accomplished with the mindset which recognizes that there is a higher power, beyond our mind as well as our limiting ego and it is to that power that we must surrender ourselves to.
It is indeed unfortunate that so often man limits himself only to the usage of his five senses as if the material world is master of it all, yet we intuitively know that this cannot be so, as the highest order of being, cannot possibly be that which has a known beginning and a known end. Even our great sun, we are told by esteemed scientists, has a finite life, of some estimated ten billion years, so invaluable to our material life as the sun is, it is not perfection, nor ever will it be. The perfection that we seek, the perfection that we must know, is in God, and we can only find this by having a deep abiding desire to know this Truth, no matter the false steps and missteps taken along the way. The material life that we live in is darkness tempered with artificial light, whereas God is absolute light, and when we as the seeker align with the true temple of our Lord, our transformation will be instant, because when darkness meets light, the surrender of darkness is instantaneous as if it all was just an illusion to begin with.