Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon says patience is his best career advice
Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon says the best career advice he ever received came from his grandmother, who urged him not to rush. He pairs that patience with a disciplined daily routine and a warning about obsession.
Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon says the best career advice he ever received did not come from a mentor in a corner office. It came from his grandmother, who told him when he was in his twenties, “Don’t be in a hurry.” Solomon shared the lesson in a rapid-fire interview with NBC News’ Christine Romans about his daily routine and the habits that have shaped his career.
The conversation was part of NBC’s “Business in America” series and aired Oct. 23, one day after Goldman launched its Small Business AI Institute. The institute is part of a new $500 million commitment to the bank’s 10,000 Small Businesses program, with Anthropic, Google, Meta and OpenAI as partners. In the segment that ran on Nightly News, Solomon said he is excited about what artificial intelligence could mean for businesses and for people’s longevity. In the lightning round, however, he focused less on markets and more on how he manages his days.
Asked to name three things he does before 7 a.m., Solomon kept his answer simple. He wakes up, goes to the gym, and generally drinks a cup of coffee and a protein shake. An early workout is a common feature of many executives’ routines, and the research on timing is less decisive than the habit itself. A 2022 systematic review published in the Public Health Agency of Canada’s journal Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention in Canada examined 35 studies. Eleven found morning activity more beneficial, 12 found afternoon or evening activity more beneficial, and 12 found no clear difference. The authors concluded there is no consistent evidence that exercising at one time of day is better for health than another, and they rated the quality of the evidence as very low.
Solomon’s main tool for keeping his day on track is unglamorous: sticking to his schedule. “The one thing that we can’t … get back is time,” he said, adding that he tries to be purposeful about how he spends it. That means making commitments and keeping them, because it is easy to drift off schedule. A 2021 meta-analysis in PLOS ONE by Brad Aeon, Aïda Faber and Alexandra Panaccio found that time management is positively linked to job performance, and even more strongly linked to well-being, especially life satisfaction. The payoff from guarding a calendar may therefore show up as much in how a person feels as in what gets done.
At first glance, sticking to a schedule and not rushing seem to pull in opposite directions. Solomon separates them by timeline: be disciplined with the hours in a day, and be patient with the arc of a career. He has repeated that message in public. In August, he told Goldman’s summer interns at a town hall that taking more time can open up opportunities, urging them to “try not to be in a hurry and enjoy the ride.” At the institute’s launch last week, he gave small-business owners similar counsel about AI, saying, “the important thing is to get it right, not to get it quicker.”
Solomon’s patience has limits, and they track the things he cares about. Asked whether he has any obsessions, he said it depends on what has captured his interest. “If I’m interested in something, I get very obsessive about it. I don’t like to do things halfway,” he said. Psychologists have found that such intensity can cut both ways. In a 2007 study in the Journal of Personality, Robert Vallerand and colleagues distinguished between “harmonious” passion, an activity freely chosen that fits with the rest of life, and “obsessive” passion, which feels compulsive. Obsessive passion predicted deliberate practice and mastery-oriented goals that supported performance, but it was also tied to fear-of-failure goals that undercut results. Harmonious passion delivered the upside with less of the downside.
Not every passion becomes a career. Solomon also named one ambition he has had to let go: playing professional basketball, which he acknowledged is no longer on the table.
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