Goldman CEO David Solomon: Best Career Advice Came From His Grandmother

By Olivia Hart

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon says the best career advice he ever received came not from a Wall Street mentor but from his grandmother: "Don't be in a hurry." He says she gave him that guidance when he was in his twenties.

Solomon delivered the line to NBC News' Christine Romans in a rapid-fire interview about his daily routine. The clip came out of Romans' wider conversation with Solomon for NBC's "Business in America" series, which aired Oct. 23. That date matters. One day earlier, Goldman launched its Small Business AI Institute, part of a new $500 million commitment to its 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 AI could mean for businesses and for people's longevity.

The half-billion-dollar commitment is the concrete news here. The grandmother anecdote is the framing around it. In the lightning round, Solomon talked less about markets and more about how he manages his days.

What does Solomon do before 7 a.m.?

Three things, and none of them are exotic. He wakes up, goes to the gym, and generally has a cup of coffee and a protein shake. That routine places him alongside executives like the Bupa CEO who trains six days a week with his Gen Z son, and the many leaders featured in Fortune's Day in the Life of a CEO series.

The evidence behind the early-morning ritual is thinner than the executive folklore suggests. 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 beats another, and they rated the evidence quality as very low. In plain words: the workout counts; the hour probably does not.

How does he keep the day on track?

His best trick is unglamorous: stick to the schedule. "The one thing that we can't … get back is time," Solomon said. He tries to be purposeful with it — making commitments and keeping them, because, as he noted, it is easy to drift off schedule.

The science backs him, with a twist. A 2021 meta-analysis in PLOS ONE by Brad Aeon, Aïda Faber, and Alexandra Panaccio found time management is positively linked to job performance. It was even more strongly linked to well-being, especially life satisfaction. Guard your calendar, and the payoff may show up in how you feel as much as in what you finish.

Why isn't slowing down a contradiction?

"Stick to the schedule" and "don't be in a hurry" seem to pull in opposite directions. For Solomon, they work on different timelines: discipline with the hours in a day, patience with the arc of a career.

He repeats the message often, which is worth noting — a CEO who preaches patience while his bank spends $500 million on AI. In August, he told Goldman's summer interns at a town hall that taking more time can open up more opportunities, urging them to "try not to be in a hurry and enjoy the ride." At the institute's launch, he offered small-business owners the same counsel about AI: "the important thing is to get it right, not to get it quicker."

The consistency is real. Whether the advice fits a founder racing better-funded competitors is a question Solomon's framing does not address.

Where does his patience end?

At the things he cares about. Asked about obsessions, Solomon 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. When something grabs him, he tends to go deep.

Psychologists have found that intensity cuts both ways. In a 2007 study in the Journal of Personality, Robert Vallerand and colleagues distinguished "harmonious" passion — an activity you freely choose that fits with the rest of your life — from "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 named one ambition he has let go of: playing professional basketball. He conceded that one is not on the table. The rest of his advice — hurry less, keep your commitments — he is clearly keeping.