We demand this attribute of our Olympians, yet it has become a dirty word

What’s the ultimate disgrace in present-day Australia? The shame that you could never admit to your bestest bestie?

I’m increasingly convinced that in our society, one vice alone is considered unforgivable. Perfectionism.

If we’re not willing to pursue perfection we’ll never achieve great things

Exactly why is this? Given that we’re all perfectionistic concerning what we really care about, and we expect comparable perfectionism in others.

Brain surgeons need to be perfectionists, as do proofreaders and civil engineers.

During the Olympics we watch athletes – the best of the best from around the world – in their desperate pursuit of a perfect performance. They know that after years of training the tiniest slip on the diving board, or a missed tackle can mean the difference between a place on the podium and a painful defeat.

Stressing perfectionism’s importance, and frequent desirability, isn’t about those whom self-defeating perfectionism torments. OCD sufferers, for example. Those made miserable by the constant desire for handwashing. Or those who can’t leave their homes because they’re only 99 per cent sure that they’ve turned off every light-switch. Such sufferers deserve only compassion.

My quarrel is with certain therapist and schoolteacher types who fling around the term “perfectionism” as if it were an embarrassing affliction. Almost any enforced group therapy session will include solemn curses of perfectionism, which seemingly causes all the globe’s evils. “You’re a perfectionist” is never a compliment.

Numerous people blame perfectionism for preventing those mistakes that supposedly encourage growth. But since when was growth always commendable?

Even where it is commendable, there is a difference between mistakes made by individuals in private, versus mistakes imperilling public safety.

Permit me, therefore, to make the case for perfectionism.

Whenever I cross the Yarra, I hope that the overpass’s designers and builders were perfectionists. I don’t want them to have been hippy-trippy types forever telling each other “Hey, chill out, no sweat, you do you boo” when five millimetres’ discrepancy in a pylon, abutment, or cantilever will make the difference between (a) me reaching the Yarra’s Southbank side alive, as against (b) the Westgate Bridge tragedy of 1970.

Or consider planes. Air traffic controllers, who must remain endlessly vigilant for hypothetical runway disasters that often begin in a heartbeat, are exactly the individuals whom you and I want employed in Tullamarine’s tower. Air traffic controllers eternally “feeling good about themselves” are a greater aeronautic danger than any terrorist.

Similar principles periodically govern even the arts, those playpens for unconstrained ids. I’ve issued five CDs of organ music, and I gratefully credit my recording producer, Thomas Grubb. He’s the most meticulous perfectionist whom I’ve met.

Tom has, so to speak, X-ray ears. In the wildest orchestral climax, Tom could discern an incorrect momentary B-flat from the third clarinettist. He brings this focus to our recordings – one errant finger stray to a G-sharp rather than the required G-natural, and Tom will demand another take. And another. That’s how you make halfway decent classical CDs.

Yet perhaps the ultimate form of desirable perfectionism in my own life comes with being a school crossing supervisor. My municipality pays me to be perfectionistic about safety.

The day when I let my guard down at the crossing, failing to perceive an oncoming car, truck, or motorcycle in time, is the day when a child’s life will be jeopardised. And perhaps (heaven forbid) lost. All because I took traffic dangers for granted that day. In short, all because I wasn’t acting like a perfectionist.

At the crossing, I have one overriding task: keeping pedestrians – particularly school students – safe. If a pedestrian is injured or, worse, killed through my doing that task imperfectly, I’ll retain no right to insist “Oh well, I tried, near enough is good enough.”

No. I salute publisher and philanthropist Kevin Weldon, who died last November. He called his 1995 bestseller Good Enough Is Never Good Enough.

If my years on this planet have taught me anything – a debatable proposition, admittedly – they are that for life’s crucial matters, those who won’t at least strive for perfection seldom attain even competence.

Achieving perfection is little likelier than achieving immortality. But if you don’t aim at it, you’ve got problems.

Dr Robert James Stove is an organist, historian, and school crossing supervisor whose next book, Kings, Queens and Fallen Monarchies is scheduled for release in November.

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