David Solomon’s father never told him what to do. When he was running down the road to turn left, Jerry Solomon had a way of making him stop and think about why left was better than right—not by arguing for right, but by forcing his son to genuinely consider it first.
Forty-some years later, Solomon is running Goldman Sachs, and the same instinct his father gave him has become the frame through which he’s telling Goldman’s 2026 intern class to approach everything from career decisions to AI.
Solomon shared the habit—along with a candid assessment of where AI helps and where it can’t—during a recent town hall with the firm’s summer intern class, according to remarks shared exclusively with Fortune. The audience was selected from an applicant pool competitive enough to hold the acceptance rate below 1% for a third consecutive year, and arrived as Goldman posted record second-quarter results: net revenues of $20.34 billion and earnings per share of $20.98, up 92% year-over-year.
The legal pad test
Solomon’s method for big decisions isn’t complicated, but it’s deliberately uncomfortable. “I have an old habit that, when I make big decisions—of taking out a piece of paper, drawing a line down the middle, and putting things on both sides of the line,” he told the interns. The twist is what happens next: “Even when I quickly put things on the left side that are overwhelmingly obvious, I force myself to think more deeply about what things I might not be thinking about, that should force me to consider the other way.”
