The Upstream View

In Part 1 I talked about the tension of committing to better clients and bigger budgets when you haven't seen that pattern consistently yet.

Now I want to show you how the sight develops.

Because the truth is: most people are looking too late.

They're trying to fix the problem at the moment of the discovery call. But the discovery call is not the beginning of the problem. It's the end of the problem becoming undeniable.

Learning to see before seeing

My first job out of college was in a leadership development program. They rotated us through departments.

My first rotation was third-tier customer support.

There was a promotion track: solve a certain number of problem types over 18-24 months, then you move up.

I was only scheduled to be there for six months. So I decided I was going to hit the 18-24 month level in six.

The first thing I did was find out what the metrics were. One of the key metrics was solving problems that affected the most customers.

So the real question became: How do you spot high-impact problems early?

We had a ticket feed that entered our department. I realized I could change the view and see tickets before they reached us—while they were still in the general customer service queue.

So I started watching upstream.

If I saw five tickets from the same city all reporting the same issue, that meant something bigger was forming—even if our queue was still quiet. The issue hadn't arrived yet. But it was already happening.

So I would grab those early, solve them fast, and stack up high-impact work.

Then I built a script so every morning I would check the upstream queue first—and load my day with the right problems.

I didn't become a top performer by being "more talented." I changed the view.

Your business works the same way

The problems you solve don't start when the project starts. They don't even start when the person books the call.

They start upstream—sometimes weeks or months earlier.

By the time someone reaches out, they've already been living with friction. They've already tried things. They've already had internal debates. They've already hit some threshold.

So your job is to learn the upstream pattern:

What happened before they admitted it was a real problem? What did they try first? What made "later" turn into "now"? What story were they telling themselves right before they reached out? What finally made them choose you?

I always find it fascinating when someone tells me, "Something just said to me I should reach out right now." I'm curious about that voice. Call it intuition. Call it timing. Call it pattern recognition.

Whatever you call it, it's trackable.

And once you can track it, you can speak to it before it's visible.

Right now I'm recording this and I can't see you. I can't hear you. But I have to be able to hold you in my mind to have this kind of transmission. I have to be able to see something without seeing it. That's not mystical—that's what happens when you understand the pattern well enough to anticipate it.

That's when your marketing stops being performance and starts being precision.

The Upstream Map

On your next 3 discovery calls, ask these questions:

What was going on when you first realized this needed to change? What did you try before you reached out? Why now—what made this urgent today? What were you hoping would happen when you started looking? Where did you look first—who did you trust while you were deciding?

You're not collecting trivia. You're building the upstream view.

Because once you know where the problem starts, you know where to show up. Once you know what they believe upstream, you know what to say. Once you know the earlier signal, certainty starts to replace guessing.

That's how you make decisions beyond sight.

Not by forcing confidence. By learning the pattern early and building your business around it.

The discomfort you feel when committing to better work? That's not proof you're on the wrong path. That's the friction of saying no to what you used to say yes to. It's the growing pains of expanding into the higher-order version of yourself.

The pattern is already there. You just need to learn to see it.