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.

After that it was creditors, liquidators, lawyers, court appointments, and a situation getting very close to bankruptcy.

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

Every day was more bad news. 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 reach for it once things are already really bad and you are trying to force your mind to reset. It was never a practice. It was an emergency measure I kept forgetting I owned.

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, find three things I had won at.

Finding three was almost impossible

Some days the win was:

Woke up.

That was it. That was the whole list.

On another day it might have been: had time to eat lunch. Most days I did not have time for that, so lunch counted.

Sometimes it was: played with my daughter. That was a big one.

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.

One line became fifteen

I put the wins on a random Twitter account. It was not connected to my name and nobody really knew who I was. I was not trying to build an audience. I needed somewhere to put the lines, and somewhere technically public gave me a little accountability.

Over time something changed. I got better at seeing them.

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

The wins did not get more impressive. I just stopped throwing them away. There had always been more than one thing in the day. At the start I could not see any of it.

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

Then it came back, for the opposite reason

I became productive again. Then AI came along and I became intensely productive — building things, testing things, chasing ideas, burning through tokens and quotas, getting a ridiculous amount done.

And 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 what I had finished. It was already looking at the next ten things I had not done.

So I started again. This time it was not about surviving the day. It was about seeing the progress inside all the activity.

Both years disappeared the same way

The shit year and the productive year felt nothing alike. Both could be gone by nine at night.

One was swallowed by everything that went wrong. The other was swallowed by everything still left to do.

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 behind.

It is not about pretending everything is good. Some days are bad. Some periods are fucking awful.

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

This happened too.