A cheap compliment can be expensive when you start organizing your life around it.

Praise given lightly can end up load bearing. Someone remarks that you have a good voice, or a head for numbers, and years later you find a whole set of choices arranged around a sentence that person forgot before the end of the week. The compliment was probably sincere and almost certainly casual. It was never meant to be a plan.

Look at something you are steering toward and ask where the idea came from. If it traces back to a remark rather than to anything you enjoyed, that is worth knowing. You can keep the pursuit or drop it, but choose it on evidence you gathered yourself.