That's a widely swinging perspective though. To have a perfectionist bent requires having the initial belief of being able to achieve perfection. Then comes the crushing negative self-assessment. With such oscillation, I'd imagine the self-concept has to pass the realism line enroute... like the clock that has the exact time precisely twice a day.

Math provides its own crushing realization of insignificance... 160 IQ is 1 in 30,000... which statistically means there are about a quarter of a million people in the world with 160 or higher IQ.