Back when I was a doe-eyed fresh college grad, I got my first 9-5. The job entailed a certain duty that required an end-of-year post mortem as part of the review process. At the end of that first year, I remember chuckling at my one-year-ago self for thinking I was good at the job. I felt even stronger about it at the end of year two, looking back at the first.

By the end of the third year, I’d learned that measuring self-worth in how efficient I was at generating stakeholder value wasn’t the greatest approach. But I had also learned that even activities without a measuring stick like school or sports can be measured in continuous learning, and it’s not a competition that you’re having with yourself. 

I think about that in the context of churning and MS now. If you asked me 3 years ago (or 2 years ago) if my current scale qualified as whale, I would easily say yes. Today, I don’t feel that way at all. The more you learn and the more people you meet, you realize what is possible.

Unlike my job example, there are clear metrics you can use to measure in churning and MS. But it’s not like there is some magical threshold of spend, profit, premium cabins booked, or combination thereof that automatically grants you access to the super secret upper echelon in the same way that a 4.0 GPA or 4.3 40 does.

In my eyes, the goal you should be shooting for is growth. Whether that means an increase in balances, efficiency, or something else is up to you. 

Taking inspiration from the heavy hitters you know is smart, but comparison is the thief of joy. Everybody’s situation is different, you should go at your own pace, and there may be some other things hampering you.

Here are some difficult to circumvent reasons that may leave you unable to keep up with your cetacean brethren, and not for lack of trying:

• You’re in your early to mid 20s, and banks don’t want to give you big credit limits for lack of credit history
• You don’t have a built in roster of extra players willing to let you scale horizontally
• You don’t live near any of the important brick and mortar stores for street MS
• You live in a state that hates fun, entertainment and/or diversity of crypto platforms

Ultimately, you’ll likely have your best luck finding some friends operating at a similar scale with similar capabilities so that you can scale up together. That’s not to say that you can’t learn a ton from a whale if you aren’t one yet – just that your possibilities might be different. 

Before I go, I’ll leave you with this rather absurd real world example of continuous learning so that you can have a laugh at my expense.  

Having more than one phone is fairly common in the churning and MS world. There’s a myriad of lucrative horizontal scaling reasons to have one that I won’t touch on here, or it could be as simple as having a separate phone to avoid bothering your P2. 

Well, I bought a second phone for a much more frivolous “MS” reason a few years ago. You may remember the “excitement” when AA became the first airline to give you a fairly straightforward path to elite status solely through MS. 

Yours truly wasn’t exactly a heavy hitter back then, and I spent some time in the ol’ AA Loyalty Point Hunters Facebook group. It was a group of people that were spending quite a bit of money to earn status on an airline they rarely flew, and I was no better.

Verizon was offering some trivial amount (8k?) of AA miles through the portal if you signed up for a new plan, and a bunch of folks were recommending a certain refurbished flip phone. The first one I bought was a lemon, and the second one didn’t have the ability to be used on that plan. I took multiple trips to the UPS store and wasted a bunch of time reading for a burner that is probably still collecting dust in the closet somewhere and a grand total of zero (0) AA miles.

Different plays, same tools – all a result of learning more. Stay curious and happy humpday.