[pizza]

It's nice to hear I'm not the only one as a kid whose reflex was to get suspicious of/thought it was lazy when/ people would quickly decide "you're smart". It seemed to me just like a way to score cheap points. It also made me feel worse about not understanding things easily.. people were telling me I was smart, after all! :P

My sister, on the other hand, gets annoyed at my perspective - she finds it tiresome when people can't take the compliment. There's wisdom to both ways, I guess.

[striking]

You can be nice about a well-meaning but ultimately misguided complement without taking it seriously.

[alexanderdmitri]

Someone once pointed out to me I had a tendency to momentarily scowl when complimented and then pretend I hadn't heard it.

Made sense because compliments made me feel weird, even though I freely gave them out.

Since then I've trained myself to smile, make eye-contact and say "Thank you, I accept your compliment with confidence," before returning to the matter at hand.

[pizza]

Agreed, though it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that, haha.