Why I Started Three Daily Wins

I started doing this two or three years ago.

It was not part of a morning routine. I was not trying to improve my productivity. Things were just really bad.

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

I was dealing with creditors, liquidators, lawyers, court appointments, and a situation that was getting very close to bankruptcy.

Every day was more bad news.

A meeting with creditors. A meeting with a lawyer. A meeting with a liquidator. Then another call. Then another problem.

It was just constant.

At night, I was in a very bad place. I was having panic attacks. I was having thoughts about self-harm. Sometimes I would listen to self-affirmations or gratitude recordings because I needed something to interrupt what was happening in my head.

The gratitude stuff helped sometimes.

You say things like:

I am grateful for the air I breathe.

I am grateful that I am alive.

I am grateful that I made it through today.

But when you are that far down, you do not naturally remember to do that. You normally reach for it when things are already really bad and you are trying to force your mind to reset.

At some point, I realised that nobody was coming to save me.

That was not some brave motivational moment. It was just the practical reality of the situation.

I had to figure out how to get through it.

So I gave myself a very small thing to do.

At the end of every day, I would try to find three things I had won at.

In the beginning, finding three was almost impossible.

Some days the win was:

Woke up.

That was it.

On another day it might have been:

Had time to eat lunch.

The rest of the day could have been creditors, lawyers, liquidators, and terrible news. But I had lunch. Most days I did not even have time for that, so it counted.

Sometimes it was:

Played with my daughter.

That was a big win.

Writing these things down did not fix the businesses. It did not make the creditors disappear. It did not sort out the legal problems.

The day could still be awful.

It just stopped the awful parts of the day from erasing everything else.

I started putting the wins on a random Twitter account. It was not connected to my name. Nobody really knew who I was.

I was not trying to build an audience.

I just needed somewhere to put the wins. Having them on a technically public account also gave me a little bit of accountability.

Over time, something changed.

I got better at seeing wins.

The list went from one difficult line to three. Then five. Then ten. Sometimes fifteen.

Eventually I stopped doing it because I did not need it in the same way anymore. I had made it through the worst part.

Then the problem came back, but for a completely different reason.

I became 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 getting a ridiculous amount done.

But I would still reach the end of the day and think:

What did I actually do?

Usually, the real answer was: quite a lot.

But my head was not keeping track of the things I had finished. It was already looking at the next ten things I had not done.

So I started using Three Daily Wins again.

This time it was not about trying to survive the day.

It was about trying to see the progress inside all the activity.

When I looked back at the week, I wanted to know that I had not just been running around doing ten thousand things. I had actually moved something forward.

That is where 3 Wins comes from.

It can help when getting out of bed is the win.

It can also help when you are doing twenty things a day and somehow still feel like you are behind.

It is not about pretending everything is good.

Some days are bad. Some periods are fucking awful.

The point is just to leave yourself a small record that says:

This happened too.