David Solomon runs one of the most powerful banks on Wall Street, but the best career advice he ever received didn’t come from a mentor in a corner office. It came from his grandmother.
“Don’t be in a hurry,” the Goldman Sachs CEO told NBC News’ Christine Romans in a rapid-fire interview about his daily routine and the lessons that have shaped his career. He said she gave him that advice when he was in his twenties.
The clip came out of Romans’ wider conversation with Solomon for NBC’s “Business in America” series. That conversation aired Oct. 23, one day after 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’s excited about what AI could mean for businesses and for people’s longevity.
In the lightning round, though, he talked less about markets and more about how he manages his days and his life.
Gym, coffee, and a protein shake before 7 a.m.
Asked to name three things he does before 7 a.m., Solomon kept it simple: He wakes up, goes to the gym, and generally has a cup of coffee and a protein shake.
He’s in good company. An early workout is a fixture of many executives’ routines, from the Bupa CEO who trains six days a week with his Gen Z son to the many leaders featured in Fortune’s Day in the Life of a CEO series.
The research suggests the habit matters more than the hour. 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 your health than another, and they rated the evidence quality as very low.
‘Stick to the schedule’
Solomon’s best trick 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 very purposeful with how he spends it. That means making commitments and keeping them, because, as he noted, it’s easy to drift off schedule.
The science backs him up, with a twist. 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. It was even more strongly linked to well-being, especially life satisfaction. In other words, the payoff from guarding your calendar may show up as much in how you feel as in what you get done.
Why slowing down isn’t a contradiction
At first glance, “stick to the schedule” and “don’t be in a hurry” seem to pull in opposite directions. For Solomon, they work on different timelines: Be disciplined with the hours in a day, and be patient with the arc of a career.
He repeats this message often. 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.” He offered small-business owners the same counsel about AI at the institute’s launch last week, telling them that “the important thing is to get it right, not to get it quicker.”
‘I don’t like to do things halfway’
Solomon’s patience has a limit, and it’s 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,” Solomon said. When something grabs him, he added, he tends to go deep.
Psychologists have found that kind of intensity cuts both ways. In a 2007 study in the Journal of Personality, Robert Vallerand and colleagues distinguished between “harmonious” passion, an activity you freely choose that fits with the rest of your life, and “obsessive” passion, which feels compulsive. Obsessive passion predicted deliberate practice and mastery-oriented goals, which 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.
The takeaway: Going deep can fuel success, as long as the obsession serves you, not the other way around.
Not every passion turns into a career, of course. Solomon also named one ambition he’s had to let go of: playing professional basketball. He conceded that one isn’t on the table.