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What Inspires Me
By Bill Novelli, November & December 2006
AARP’s CEO learned the value of giving back at an early age
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Ethel Percy Andrus, a teacher and the founder of AARP, best defined how to create a legacy: "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are today."
Many years ago my mother took me along when she taught handicrafts in a Boys Club in Carnegie, Pennsylvania. I've never forgotten it. My father, Dominic Novelli, along with a few other men, started an association for kids' sports in our small town near Pittsburgh back in 1956. Today the Bridgeville Athletic Association is still operating, and thousands of young people, including my brother, Jerry, and me, have benefited.
My son Peter is a fifth-grade teacher. He took a while to decide to go into education, with its low salaries and stressful work. But now he's building an important legacy, 20 children at a time, year after year. Who knows what contributions those kids will make and what kind of impact their lives will have on others and on our society?
We can all leave legacies. It's what we do when we coach a youth soccer team, look in on a neighbor who lives alone, help out in a school, advocate for a cause, deliver Meals On Wheels, or volunteer in our house of worship. It's what Rosa Parks, an ordinary woman, did in 1955 when she kept her seat on a bus in Alabama with the simple sentence: "My feet are tired," thus triggering one of the great and ongoing transformations in our nation's history.
Millions of Americans have embraced the notion that while we live in an imperfect world, there is much we can do to make things better. They represent the kind of people that Thomas Jefferson referred to as an "aristocracy of virtue and talent." By those whom they help or inspire, they are simply called heroes.
From the book 50+: Igniting a Revolution to Reinvent America, by Bill Novelli. Copyright © 2006 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. Also available as an abridged audio CD from Audio Renaissance.
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