Wednesday 24 August 2016

Back on the win wagon

My longest dry spell for well over a year has come to an end! Two (albeit modest) wins in as many days has certainly helped kickstart my mojo and get my game back in to 2nd gear (let's end the car analogy there - I seldom hit fourth and couldn't find fifth with a Haynes manual).
Hangover cure ... I'm told!
The first win of the last few weeks - which I have a feeling I'll be needing pretty soon
I guess the simple fact is that nothing succeeds like success, and - by extension - nothing sows the seeds of success like successfully sowing success seeds (note to self: stay off the analogies, yeah?). 

So, what are these success seeds? If I’m honest, they’re magic beans by any other name. The first is that positive mental attitude I mentioned previously. Happily, I hadn’t lost this along with my mojo, but as a little celebration of past wins never hurts, I booked afternoon tea and champagne for me and my wife. I won this voucher last December but couldn’t get a daytime babysitter until now. (And given that - as every parent knows - getting a babysitter is a triumph in its own right, I’m adding that to my win list too!)
Scone
Cash in the old wins ... for cake!
As for the second seed, that’s the skeleton routine. You know, a super pared-down autopilot routine that maintains some basic semblance of comping normality. For me, that’s basically opening a set of comping bookmarks (local comp searches and daily lotteries). These bookmarks take seconds to open and, at most, minutes to close. Anything I do on top of this - whether catching up with Facebook groups or hashtag searching on Instagram - is a bonus.

Speaking of Instagram, the other thing I've started doing again is comper stalking. I'd forgotten all about this for the last few months. And what a time to forget too - since I last looked, Instagram has much improved this facility, so you're no longer restricted to the last 24 hours of an instagrammer’s life. They kept that update quiet!

To be sure, stalking is also possible on Facebook and Twitter, but I’ve always found it like panning for gold in a haystack (sorry - I promised to stay away from the analogies didn’t I?). The sheer volume of like-share and RT noise makes it nigh impossible to identify the low-entry comps. Instagram by contrast, “has yet to be fully exploited by promoters”. A correlate of this is that it is also yet to be fully populated by compers! It is still possible to find comps with under a hundred entrants. Case in point: this year I have won a Kindle and tickets to see Beyonce on Instagram, and in neither case were there 15 entrants.

As luck would have it too, I’ve been laid up in bed for the last couple of days (doctor’s orders!) so I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about my comping game than I have over the preceding month. That’s not to say I recommend minor surgery as a route to improving one’s winning streak, but if you’re gifted an opportunity, don’t look it in the mouth!


How’s your summer been? Has the hot weather tempered your comping game? How do get yourself back up to speed when your mojo starts to splutter?