Quote of the Week: “It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”

Free Coffee is Contagious Revisited. Earlier this year, one of the Wednesday Weblogs, 'Free Coffee is Contagious' included my story of going through a Dunkin Donuts Drive-Thru and paying for the person in the car behind me. Here are two stories, one sad but heartwarming, and one that will just blow you away.

Story 1: Barry Peters' world was turned upside down six months ago when his wife died suddenly. Family Pays it Forward at Dunkin

Story 2: At a Drive-Thru in Minnesota, you won't believe what happened when one car paid it forward. Dairy Queen Chain Reaction

Ok, it might not really be a saga, but it sure sounded good in the title, don't you agree? The story is about my experience as a paperboy and how I learned about Accountability and Excuses in a land long ago and far away.

By the time I was a ten-years old I was ready to have an afternoon paper route. For those younger than 50, before the internet and social media, before cable television and email, EVERYONE got their news in something called a ‘Newspaper.’

You may have even seen photos of something called the ‘Front Page’ of a newspaper? Boston had seven daily papers. Five in the morning and two in the afternoon. Local towns also had daily papers. That's a lot of crossword puzzles.

You had to be responsible to have a paper route, as well as have an interest in generating extra spending money, and when a paper route came open, because, for example, a 13-year-old was retiring from the business, there was a flurry of applicants for the news distributor to interview. I got the job for one of the routes. At ten years old.

The process I followed was: I hopped on my bike after school, rode the two miles to the news distributor, picked up a bale of newspapers, cut the string, folded the papers, and stuffed them in the basket on the front of my bike, and started the trip to delivering 40 newspapers in a couple of hours. They gave you one of those classic newsboy bags, but I liked the bike basket better.

In those days, you got a quarter per customer per week from the distributor, in exchange for delivering the paper six days. The Sunday paper was only a morning edition, so no delivery from the afternoon team was required.

You didn’t mind the sixth day, which was Saturday, because you rang the doorbell and, utilizing skills you had acquired trick or treating, when it opened you announced “Collecting” in a firm voice. They gave you a buck for the subscription for the week, and if you were good that week, they might give you a dime tip, with big spenders laying a quarter on you. Some people didn't tip at all, and there was an urge to let's say 'modify' the service, but nothing that I acted out.

With 40 papers to deliver, you could make $10 from the news distributor and $5-$6 from tips. Let me tell you, a ten-year-old with $15 a week was in the upper income bracket of most my age in my town.

But this is where the accountability part of the story comes in.

The outgoing paperboy took me around and showed me which houses got the Boston Traveler, which got the Boston Globe, which got the Quincy Patriot Ledger and who got the Christian Science Monitor. It was like a matrix, although I didn’t know it at the time. If Excel had been invented, it would have been a lot easier. Papers on one axis, Streets on another. The entire route was probably 2 miles and twenty streets with one to three subscribers per street-it was an afternoon paper, and we finished the 'transition day' just before dusk.

I didn’t have the efficiency of the outgoing boy, and it took me longer. It got dark. I couldn’t recognize the houses or the numbers as easily as he could. I remember trying to read details in a little book while sitting on my bike under a streetlight. I got home late. I wasn’t 100% sure that I had delivered all the right papers to all the right houses, but I knew I was close.

This was the day I learned that close wasn’t good enough. Several people flagged me down and wondered where their paper was the day before, why they got the wrong paper or why they got a free paper. This was going to be harder than I thought.

I did it right by day four, and breathed a sigh of relief, until my Dad got home. He indicated to me that I needed to mimeograph (copy) a half sheet of paper with my name and address, phone number and note on it, and give it to each customer when I collected for the first time on Saturday. The note said:

And that’s the day I understood what being accountable was all about, because once I handed them that paper, believe me, I felt accountable in a whole new way. I owned 'it,' I was accountable.

The money was a great benefit to the job for a ten-year-old, but the lessons learned from my parents lasted a lot longer than the money.

They lasted a lifetime. I learned about accountability but I also learned about excuses, because that piece of paper I handed to each customer, took them away. But we all forget, and years later when a 22-year-old kid called me out, I remembered in a more dramatic fashion, how people react to excuses.

What sets people over the edge more than anything else is excuses. No one likes them, no one wants them, and everyone claims they don’t use them: they use "explanations." In the real world if you have to explain what didn’t happen that was supposed to happen, you can call it an explanation, but everyone else is calling it an excuse behind your back.

How can this double-meaning be so pervasive? Here is my theory, and it is simple: we all judge ourselves, and we do so based on our intentions. When we judge others we do that based on their actions. Think about that for a minute. Judging ourselves based on our intentions has words like I was going to...I intended to…I planned to…I thought… I believed…I felt.

As a young restaurant manager, I had a great employee who was attending Boston College Law School, and he called me out because his pay check was short. When I gave him an excuse for messing up his check, he looked me right in the eye and gave me a lesson I've never forgotten when he said:

Sometimes it is easier than other times but owning it and owning up to it eventually feels better and makes you a better person, leader, and employee. I owned up to it with the paper route at 10 years old, and I've slipped up plenty in my life, and still do, along the way, but I always eventually remember that excuses ARE for beginners and losers.

Next time you are in a discussion and you hear yourself saying ‘I meant...’ or any of the derivatives, stop and think about it: are you judging yourself on your intentions? Are you making excuses? Are you a beginner or a loser? If you are not either, don’t make excuses and own it, whatever ‘it’ might be.

That paper route, and the lessons, were transferred to my younger brother Brian after me, and then he passed it to our younger brother Paul, after him, who passed it along to our younger brother Chris after that, and then we ran out of brothers, it may have even gone to my sister Susan somewhere along the way? Probably 15 years of service to families in Braintree and each one of them had a Doherty name, address, and phone number on a little piece of paper they were handed on a Saturday by their paper person.

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