This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

And we love your stories, our listener's stories.

Please send them to Our American Stories.com.

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You're about to hear from Paul Blavin, a man who had a cause put on his heart

and who wasted no time responding to it.

You'll hear the story of how he went from

workaholism on Wall Street to retiring to do the kind of work that he felt could truly make a

difference. Here's Paul. I grew up in Southfield, Michigan, which is a suburb right outside of Detroit.

My community was a middle-class, predominantly Jewish community,

that was very focused on education and careers.

We were on the lower socioeconomic side of our community. My father struggled with mental illness,

which manifested in criminal behavior. And he was actually arrested for the first time when I was

11. And I was the paper boy. I delivered newspapers in my community and it was on the front page of the paper I delivered.

So it was really traumatic and it also had a big impact obviously on our family in terms of finances.

So the impact it had on me was that I decided that I really wanted to be independent,

that I didn't want to be a burden on my mother, and that I wanted to establish myself as a

reputable, accomplished person. I'm sure my thoughts were a little different at the age of 11, but that was

the direction I put myself on. So that was highly motivating, and, you know, I was driven a lot by fear.

I got my first job delivering newspapers when I was about 11, and then started my first business when I was 15.

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