For me, I guess it's personal. I am a big-concepts person and, at least in high school, tended to understand the material better than most of the other students. But I hated the small details and always made one or two careless errors, which meant that the detail people often outscored me. In our system we both got A's, but if you bump that cut-off much higher, my score would have been a B.
It seems to me that there is a difference between high standards and obsessively detail-oriented perfectionism. Does that make me sound bitter?
