Someone asked me at a recent tea tasting: "How did you know you were ready to open the Teahouse?"

Here's the honest answer.

I was living in Taiwan. Tea sales were growing — more customers, more wholesale accounts, more tea moving out the door. At that point I was doing wholesale only, no retail, no teahouse. Just me and the tea and the people who wanted it.

My parents had been watching from a distance, helping out a little here and there, seeing the growth firsthand. My mom especially wanted me to move back to the US. She brought it up often, and one day during a phone call she really pressed me on it.

So I just asked her straight: "If I move back, what am I going to do for a living?"

I remembered what it felt like to be a young adult in the US — the financial pressure of just trying to keep the lights on, nothing extravagant, just surviving. That feeling was still very real to me.

Her answer? Sell tea.

Just like that. No hesitation.

That meant a lot. It was encouraging to know she had that kind of faith in me. But I still had doubts. A lot of them.

Shortly after, I was sitting with my teacher in his shop in Taiwan — one of those slow, quiet afternoons where the tea does most of the talking. I told him I was seriously considering making the move, going all in on the tea business back in the States. And then I told him the truth: I had doubts. I was nervous. I didn't know if I could do it.

He looked at me and said:

"If you want to be an ox, you just need to put on the yoke."

That was it. That was all he said.

Ancient wisdom. Simple and direct. Maybe I had been making it too complicated. Maybe readiness isn't a destination you arrive at — maybe it's something you grow into by starting.

I wasn't ready when I started selling tea. And that turned out to be okay.

What I was ready to do was work. I was willing to put in the time, to show up, to keep going even when I didn't know exactly what I was doing — which, honestly, was a lot of the time. I didn't always do the right thing. I didn't always know what I should be doing. But I wasn't trying to cut corners. I just didn't have all the answers yet.

Over the course of 20-plus years, the answers came. Not all at once. Slowly, through the doing.

There's no sign from the heavens. There's no mentor or guru who's going to appear and tell you that your dream is the right one, that the timing is perfect, that you're finally ready to begin.

You have to take a leap of faith. You have to be willing to put in the time and effort. And you have to keep moving.

Zig Ziglar said it well: "If you wait for all the traffic lights to turn green before you leave your home, you'll never get started on your trip to the top."

Stop. Go. Stop. Go. That's the rhythm. That's how you get there.

The goal isn't to have everything figured out before you start. The goal is to put on the yoke — and start pulling.