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.
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.
It was a dumb game, but it taught me an important life lesson about how adults will believe what they want to believe. You don't even have to lie to people if they're willing to lie to themselves.
But essentially any praise from humans is not.
It's part of why I walked away from a National Merit Scholarship and dropped out of college at age 20.
I was the youngest kid at home and I learned to read at age four because my long-suffering, doting older sister reread me the same book a jillion times at my insistence. The poor woman could still quote the book in her forties.
Most of what I knew had nothing whatsoever to do with school.
Plus, it winds up being code for "You should all beat him up in the bathroom every chance you get!"
Gee, thanks.
(No, I was not literally beaten up in the bathroom.)
and from different perspective, the feeling that this came easy to you is exactly what would make you gifted. you are not impressed by your own achievements, but they are achievements. this is what gifted means. what's hard for someone else is easy for you.
that doesn't make it a good idea to call people gifted, because that has a tendency to make them lazy. it seems you saw through that though.
How the heck did you convince yourself to believe it? As a "gifted" kid, what I learned very quickly was that adults will happily exaggerate minor talents (which one acquires primarily through just spending time on them, a task made markedly easier when everybody else hates you) to absurdity- at one point I got an evaluation back from a summer program at Stanford telling me I might grow up to be "one of the best programmers of our age". What did I do to earn such acclaim? Got ahead of the rest of the class making a game, read the documentation for Flash, and used the extra time to add "voice controls" to my game (specifically, you'd shoot by yelling anything into your microphone, it was just triggered by levels.)
Seriously- how can you take that sort of praise seriously, and not just as a "look at the cute kid who knows more Adobe Flash than the rest of his age group"?