The Game I Wasn’t Allowed to Play Became the Business Model

I have always been good at puzzles. The metal ones that come tangled together and you have to figure out which piece moves first before anything comes apart. The wooden ones where nothing looks like it connects but somehow they all do. Give me something that requires you to see the whole picture before you touch a single piece and I will sit with it until I figure it out. I cannot help it.

My parents got a new PC and we were not allowed to use it.

That rule lasted about a week.

My dad had a 40-in-one game disc. I knew enough to navigate to the C prompt and run it. So I did, whenever I could sneak in, until I had to close everything and pretend I had never been there.

One of those games was Pushover. You had a field of dominoes and you had to set them up so that knocking the first one would send the whole chain falling in exactly the right sequence. Each tile behaved differently — some fell and triggered splits, some blocked, some reversed direction. You had to understand what each piece did and plan the whole sequence before you pushed.

The puzzle part was intuitive to me. What I was not prepared for was the timer.

You had to solve it and push before the time ran out. Get it wrong — wrong piece, wrong position, wrong order — and you did not just redo that level. You went back to level one. From the beginning. Every single time. No checkpoints. No retry from where the chain broke. If the chain did not fall correctly and completely, in time, you started over.

I was obsessed with finishing it.

Not because it was hard. Because it was one of those puzzles where the answer always existed. You just had to find the combination that made everything fall into place — and you had to find it before the clock ran out.

I never forgot that game. But I did not think about it again professionally for a long time.

For the next thirty years I sold, studied, built, and untangled — phones, legal documents, websites, workflows, systems that had been running on memory and habit for a decade. I thought I was just someone who couldn’t leave broken things alone. I did not realize I was still playing the same game.

Thirty years later, a client asked me to explain a workflow

It was fifteen steps long. One of those steps required a human. The rest fired automatically once that single action happened: a form submitted, a quote created, documents routed, approvals collected, records updated, notifications sent. The whole chain, from that one push.

I was trying to figure out how to explain this to the client without losing them in the middle. Fifteen steps is a lot to follow. But that is not really what they needed to understand. What they needed to understand was: you do one thing. Then everything else happens.

I was thinking about how to frame that when I had a sudden flashback to that forbidden PC, that 40-in-one disc, that field of dominoes waiting to fall.

That is exactly what I had been building. Not software. Not integrations. A domino chain. The client was the person who placed the first tile. My job was to make sure all the others were in the right position so that one push would run the whole thing.

The methodology had always been the same. I had just been playing a different version of it.

The part that matters

What I loved about Pushover at thirteen was not the individual tiles. It was the sequence. Any single tile was just a tile. Put it in the wrong position and the chain broke. Put it in the right position and the whole run was clean. The tile did not change. The position did.

That is the same thing I am doing now. Most businesses already have the pieces. They have the CRM, the scheduling tool, the invoicing software, the booking platform. What they do not have is the pieces in the right order, connected correctly, so that one action starts the chain and the rest follows without anyone in the middle holding it together.

The wrong order breaks the chain. The right order runs it cleanly. The outcome always exists. You just have to find the right combination to get there.

I spent a lot of years trying to describe this to clients in different ways. Workflow design. Systems architecture. Automation sequencing. None of those phrases landed the way I wanted them to.

Then I remembered a game I was not supposed to be playing.

That is The Pushover Method. Not a framework I invented. A game I never stopped playing. I just do it in real life now.