Although I like the melody of John Mayer’s song ”Waiting for the World to Change”, I have a major problem with the lyrics. Mayer gives people an excuse for not taking action to make change happen:

….we see everything that’s going wrong
with the world and those who lead it
we just feel like we don’t have the means
to rise above and beat it

so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

….One day our generation
Is gonna rule the population
So we keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change

I’ve never liked waiting. I suppose that may be a common trait among entrepreneurs – if we aren’t content with a situation, we usually try to do something about it. And a lack of mean has never been enough to stop an entrepreneur from trying to solve a problem? If lack of resources were an excuse for inaction, my co-founder Barry and I certainly would not have created Honest Tea, which was launched out of my house with five thermoses and an empty Snapple bottle.

There are too many things in the world that need to be changed, and we don’t have the luxury of waiting – whether it’s the lack of opportunity we see in our urban areas or the alarming environmental trends, we need to embrace what Martin Luther King Jr. described as “the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”

And by the time, most of our generation rules the population, we will have become entrenched in the status quo – and rarely does any major change come from those who have a stake in the way things are.

Of course it’s hard to feel like any one of us is single-handedly solving the world’s problems, but we all can help change the world. Here are a few small ways:

- Help serve your local community…. Visit City Year at www.cityyear.org or a local volunteer organization and find out how you can participate in a local day of service.
- Help reduce the scale of synthetic chemicals going into the ecosystem and your body by supporting organic agriculture
- Help ensure that you are supporting fair wages and labor conditions by purchasing Fair Trade products
- Support clean energy and conservation efforts. Visit www.RENEWUS.org for more information

As the Chinese proverb underneath one of our bottlecaps says, “If we don’t change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.” If we don’t change our direction, we are waiting for the world to change, and not changing it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Blog from Seth & Barry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.