One of the first things I ever wrote about churning was this guest post for MEAB. Embarrassing usage of AI slop aside, I think it’s still helpful advice to keep in mind. When something keeps popping up but isn’t obvious to you, you’re probably missing something.
Today, let’s dig a little deeper into that concept and get more tactical.
Over the course of your MS adventure, countless opportunities will show up. Some of them are instantly exciting, some of them are instantly not, but most of them are in a vague middle that requires some probing.
Within that vague middle are a lot of things where you can see the utility, but it’s not immediately clear where it fits for you. Let’s take adding multiple players as an example.
Even the most beginner of churners can easily understand the basic benefit of adding a player – it’s a new credit report, a new phone number, etc etc. But for awhile, the idea of managing other people sounds awful. You have to deal with their credit profile, spending for them, and the inevitable case of them opening a store card.
But as you advance, you find easy ways to get around many of those pitfalls, and you realize that the true utility in multiple players is orders of magnitude more than getting an extra 300k MR every 90 days.
In this case, it’s ok that it takes you time to figure out why it matters, and it’s probably good that it does, because you’re better equipped to make the lives of your other players as easy as possible.
As we all know though, the majority of other opportunities that pop up afford you very limited time to have the tools and structure in place to fully take advantage.
In this current MS ecosystem, things change really quickly. You don’t have the luxury of growing in the hobby for years to understand how valuable something like multiple players is.
And the type of things I’m thinking of as inspiration for this post are nowhere near as obviously valuable as multiple players, either. It’s often something as subtle as a different variant on something you’re already doing that requires some extra effort to obtain.
The thesis of my old guest post was to probe and understand why people are talking about something without an obvious benefit. That remains true, and I’d go so far as to say that sometimes the order of operations is to obtain something when it’s available to you, even if you need to take time afterwards to understand the point.
Even if it’s not part of your portfolio when you find out, that may not stay the same in the future. Plus, things change – applications close, payment methods stop being accepted, and it’s much better to be grandfathered in than locked out (or in a never ending queue of requestors).
In the end, this hobby just does not reward procrastination, both in the high stakes example above and down to /r/churning Purge shitpost tier stuff like Paze credits. If you’re a natural procrastinator like I am, do whatever you need to do to kick the habit when it comes to churning.
I might still wait til the last minute to pack for a trip, but not when something new comes across my desk, regardless of where I see it fitting into my current setup.
Does this mean I probably have a decent chunk of money hidden in my digital couch cushions? Yes, but it’s far outweighed by what I had access to because of planning ahead.
Kuri ubuzima bwiza!
Pictured: how MSers should look when a new product hits the scene