About the
Unpolished Series

The Unpolished article series is a collection of words, thoughts, and musings from the Threads Worldwide founders.

Turbulence

Kara and I boarded the plane mid-way through the pilot’s introduction. He was sharing details like the cost of an airplane battery (over $10K) and how much the fuel would cost to get us to Cleveland (over $6K). He was a friendly and informative pilot and I loved it! He warned that there was going to be turbulence, that he would do his best to avoid it, and that it was coming.

True to his word, an hour into the flight the plane started bouncing. “We currently have an X* mile/hour headwind and we’re going to go through some choppy air to eventually have a 200 mile/hour tailwind. We’ll be landing 20 minutes early.”

A few minutes later, we started bouncing and I started sweating profusely. What got me through it was the knowledge that this turbulence was expected, and that it was temporary.

What if those choppy moments in life are just life transitioning from the headwind slowing you down to a tailwind that’s got your back? Surely it will be bumpy in the transition!

For example… Let’s talk about August. Oh August of 2019… You son of a gun. Here we are – flying high from our largest July ever… placing all our reorders for the holiday season based on July’s numbers when you come along… You come along and you decide to extend your vacation and freak us the heck out. In other words, you were our headwind.

Everyone at Threads dug in deep and got serious about what we all needed to do to make the transition to the tailwind of the holidays. The grit we had to show during August, the customers we had to reach, the Ambassadors we had to coach, the way we had to dig in with our resolve for ourselves and our small businesses… All of that put us in SUCH a great position moving into the holidays.

We just had our largest month EVER, breaking even the ‘dare’ goal we set for ourselves. Had it not been for the headwind of August, I know we wouldn’t have ended November as strong in revenue or in our will as we did.

It was the transition from headwind to tailwind that made us better. And now, we are on our way to arriving early.

*I don’t remember the miles/hour