What Warren Buffett Learnt From His First Job Delivering Newspapers At The Age of 13

It's a no-brainer that 92-year-old Warren Buffett is one of the world's greatest and most admired investors. The billionaire has been an active investor for nearly eight decades.

It all started at the age of just 13 when Buffett took up his first job delivering newspapers.

Warren Buffett Turned A Simple Job Into A Competition

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At the age of 13, not only did Buffett being the odd job of delivering copies of The Washing Post in Washington D.C., he even turned the task into a competition with himself. With his father representing a Nebraska district in Congress, Buffett woke up at 4:30 in the morning, even during Christmas holidays, to deliver copies of the newspaper, and he challenged himself to find ways to serve each of his five buildings faster.

Then he found ways to track when the houses along his route had magazine subscriptions expiring and sold new subscriptions on the side, along with calendars.

By the age of 15, Buffett had made $2,000 delivering papers. He invested $1,200 of that in a 40-acre farm where he had a profit-sharing agreement with a Nebraskan farmer, as per a CNBC report.

Also Read: 10 Inspirational Quotes From Warren Buffett

What He Learnt From Delivering Newspapers

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Going door-to-door delivering newspapers in the 1940s also taught him the value of waking up early and working hard in order to advance. By the time he was 14, he had three paper routes and earned $175 a month. That year, Buffett even filed his first federal income tax return, having earned $592.50 in 1944 (the IRS required all U.S. citizens, even minors, who made more than $500 to file a return.) And by the age of 15, he had saved what the average American had earned in a year, according to economics reporter Barry Wood.

"I learned, frankly, that if you did a good job, you were gonna move up. The very fact that I did a good job in Spring Valley got me the Westchester routes later on," Buffett told economics reporter Barry Wood in a 2015 interview, as per a CNBC report. "I was fortunate in that I was here during probably the most interesting period you could probably be here in Washington, during World War II. I delivered the papers when Roosevelt died and when the atomic bomb dropped."

His Continued His Connection With Newspapers

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The billionaire did not leave his connection with newspapers on his way up in life. From 2012 to 2017, Warren Buffett even paid homage to his past with a newspaper-throwing contest at his annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting.

He was reportedly once the largest shareholder of the Washington Post, too. In 2020, as per Forbes, Buffett announced that he has agreed to sell Berkshire Hathaway¡¯s portfolio of 31 local papers to publisher Lee Enterprises for $140 million in cash.

Also Read: 15 Books Recommended By Billionaire Warren Buffett For Investors

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