From one line to fifteen

When I first started writing down wins, one line was difficult.

Things were bad.

Within about six months, I had to close most of the food and beverage businesses I was running. Almost everything was wiped out.

My days were creditors, lawyers, liquidators, and court appointments.

A meeting.

A call.

Another problem.

More bad news.

At night, I was having panic attacks. Sometimes I listened to gratitude recordings because I needed to interrupt what was happening in my head.

Eventually, I gave myself one small thing to do.

At the end of the day, I tried to find three things I had won at.

Three was the idea. It was never a rule.

Some days I only had:

Woke up.

Sometimes:

Had time to eat lunch.

Or:

Played with my daughter.

The rest of the day could still be fucking awful.

Writing down lunch did not make the creditors disappear. Playing with my daughter did not resolve anything with the lawyers or liquidators. None of it changed what might happen in court.

It just meant the worst parts of the day did not get to erase everything else.

I put the wins on a random Twitter account that was not connected to my name. Nobody really knew who I was.

I was not building an audience.

I just wanted somewhere to leave the record.

Over time, I got better at seeing wins.

One difficult line became three.

Then five.

Then ten.

Sometimes fifteen.

There had always been more than one thing in the day. I just could not see any of it at first.

Eventually, I stopped.

I did not need the record in the same way anymore.

Then I started again.

This time, my life looked completely different.

I was productive again. Then AI came along and I became intensely productive.

I was building things, testing things, chasing ideas, burning through tokens and quotas, and finishing a ridiculous amount of work.

Still, I would reach the end of the day and think:

What did I actually do?

My head had already moved on to the next ten things.

The problem was no longer that one terrible thing erased the rest of the day.

It was that all the unfinished things erased the finished ones.

So I went back to writing down wins.

Not to pretend everything was good.

Not to force gratitude.

Not to score the day.

Just to remember what happened.

Sometimes there is one line. Sometimes there are fifteen. I can skip a day or disappear for two weeks. Nothing happens.

It is private.

It is just a record.

The shit year is in there.

The productive year is in there too.

Both can make me forget a day as it actually was.

The lines help me see it.