In 1984, a young 22-year-old graduate named David Solomon applied for an analyst position at Goldman Sachs. He was rejected.
He didn't have the "typical" pedigree. He didn't come from an Ivy League school. He was a rugby player who had spent his summers raking leaves and flipping burgers at McDonald's.
Goldman Sachs didn't want him.
Undeterred, Solomon took a position at Irving Trust, a modest commercial bank, where he began learning the basics of finance from scratch. About a year in, he tried Goldman Sachs again.
He made it through round after round of interviews, performing well at every stage.
He was rejected in the final round. Two attempts. Two rejections.
He moved to Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1986, but the whole thing collapsed four years later after the Michael Milken scandal. Solomon was 28 years old, and the firm he had bet his career on no longer existed.
He picked himself up and walked into Bear Stearns. Over the next nine years, he built the junk bond division, financed landmark deals like Sheldon Adelson's Venetian Hotel, and climbed all the way to the firm's 10-person management committee.
And then, in 1999, his phone rang.
It was Goldman Sachs.
The same firm that had rejected his application letter. But this time, they were recruiting him as a partner.
Solomon joined Goldman Sachs at 37, not through the front door as a junior, but through the executive suite.
He became Global Head of Financing, then co-head of the entire Investment Banking Division, where over a decade he doubled profit margins from 11% to 22%.
In 2018, David Solomon was named Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Goldman Sachs.
When asked how he got there, he didn't credit genius or ambition. He simply said it was partly "dumb luck."
The lesson is a masterclass in persistence:
A rejection at 22 is not a life sentence. Your career is not a straight line; it is a series of pivots and "51/49" decisions where the margin for success is thin.
Don't let a "no" at the start determine where you finish.
