Our President & CEO, Tim Morin, still has the newspaper clipping.
"Courier Carrier of the Week," it reads, above a photo of a very serious-looking twelve-year-old Tim in a striped shirt.
He delivered The Courier, a local weekly newspaper to neighbors in his New Jersey suburb. At the time, it was a job that seemed critically important. Looking back, he realizes it taught him even more than he gave it credit for.
One memory stands out.
It was a windy fall morning. As he was delivering a paper to a customer's porch, a gust of wind knocked over his bike. Newspapers spilled across the lawn before blowing into the woods and disappearing. He stood there, helpless, horrified. He had just started his route, and now most of his customers wouldn't receive their paper.
Oh my God, he thought, what now?
He went home without telling anyone, bracing himself for angry phone calls and wondering, How will I redeem myself?
Not one call came. Nobody seemed to notice, let alone mind. At the time, it felt like the highest of stakes. In hindsight, it was about as low-stakes as failure gets — but the feeling was real, and so was the lesson: sometimes the thing you're most afraid of simply doesn't happen the way you expect. And you survive.
The following week, Tim got back on his bike (papers more tightly secured), delivered his route, and kept showing up.
One bad morning didn't define him. The consistency that followed did. Over time, he earned his customers' trust and, eventually, recognition as Courier Carrier of the Week (along with a $5 bonus check!).
It all started because someone trusted a twelve-year-old with something that mattered.
Tim's story got me thinking about Peter Hessler's recent New Yorker essay, "The Paperboy's Secret." Hessler, an acclaimed journalist and author, writes about Eric Neuner, who became a paperboy obsessed with doing the job well. That early focus on efficiency and excellence stayed with him; at age twenty-four, Eric founded NuShoe, which grew into one of the world's largest shoe-repair companies. Eric himself credits the discipline and operational mindset he developed as a paper carrier with helping shape his later success.
It made me wonder: how many accomplished people got their start the same way? What did that early responsibility actually build in them?
The list, it turns out, is long. Across industries and generations, accomplished leaders often trace important lessons back to their first paper routes. Warren Buffett has called his paper route his first business — managing customers, collecting payments, and tracking profits. Tim Cook credits pre-dawn deliveries with instilling the discipline that still defines his leadership. Michael Dell learned to identify likely customers while selling subscriptions door to door, years before founding Dell Technologies.
A paper route was, for many, a first "stretch assignment," and an unusually complete one. It was often the first time they sold anything, going door to door to sign up subscribers and learning, sometimes painfully, what it took to get a stranger to say yes. It was the first time they were responsible for customer service, because an unhappy subscriber was their problem to fix, not their parents'. It was the first time they held professional responsibility of any kind, out from under the direct protection of mom or dad.
And it was a steady source of feedback — a satisfied customer, a complaint, a tip, a dog that came to trust you — that built the muscle of self-awareness: How am I actually doing?
Long before competency models, leadership frameworks, and executive coaching, many of us had our own version of a paper route. Someone handed us responsibility before we felt entirely ready. People counted on us. We made mistakes. We figured things out. We learned what it felt like to earn trust.
WJM's Senior Vice President, Scott Litchfield, remembers sharing a paper route with his older sister. One customer insisted the paper be placed on a table in the basement, and one winter morning Scott was accused of leaving the door open, nearly causing the homeowner's pipes to freeze. Whether or not the accusation was fair, it became an early lesson in accountability. He learned that when trust is shaken, how you respond often matters as much as what happened.
As a Coach Supervisor, I spend a great deal of time thinking about how leaders develop.
We build development plans. We recommend stretch assignments. We encourage organizations to give emerging leaders opportunities that strengthen judgment, accountability, resilience, and confidence.
Listening to Tim's and Scott's stories made me realize we're often trying to recreate something previous generations often experienced early in life.
Not a paper route.
An early opportunity to be trusted.
A chance to carry responsibility before you felt completely ready. To discover that people were counting on you. To make mistakes, recover from them, and slowly become a person others could depend on.
Today's emerging leaders are growing up in a different world. Few will ever fold newspapers before sunrise or knock on doors collecting subscription payments. But the developmental need hasn't changed.
The question for organizations is how to create the modern equivalent of the paper route.
Where can we entrust people with meaningful responsibility before they feel completely comfortable?
Where can they stumble, recover, and discover what they're capable of?
Where can they experience the kind of accountability and confidence that only real responsibility can teach?
Leadership doesn't begin the day someone receives a title.
It begins the first time someone trusts you with something that matters.
