Blankfein’s post-Goldman retirement reshapes how he thinks

Blankfein learned – In Lloyd Blankfein’s memoir “Streetwise,” the ex-Goldman CEO describes how growing up in public housing forced a different relationship with money—and how retirement has let him live by that shift. From learning to enjoy donating to trading daily and building

For Lloyd Blankfein, the biggest lesson about wealth didn’t arrive on a trading floor or in a boardroom. It arrived in the everyday math of survival—counting every dollar and applying for scholarships while growing up in public housing on a Brooklyn housing project.

In “Streetwise. ” published this spring. Blankfein describes how that upbringing left “a mark” on him: “growing up in public housing. in a family that was just getting by. and attending public schools that were failing.” He says the habit of tightening your belt made generosity feel distant. “When counting every dollar and applying for scholarships was the norm. it was the ‘furthest thing from your mind to give money away. ’” he wrote.

Then came the other life—Harvard, a corporate tax law career, and eventually becoming CEO of Goldman Sachs. Blankfein writes that earning a lot required a mental adjustment: he had to learn to enjoy donating some of it. He also recounts moments when the world around him didn’t match the instincts he’d built earlier.

At Harvard, he watched his rowing teammates “ripping towels into shreds” to use as makeshift headbands. “Where I came from, you used a towel for approximately forty years,” he wrote. “Here people didn’t husband everything or feel that they always had to defer gratification.”

He also remembers an awkward dinner at a wealthy girlfriend’s house, where even basic etiquette turned into humiliation. “The first course looked like the top of a pineapple. and I picked off leaves and started eating with everyone else. I chewed and chewed and wasn’t getting anywhere. Everyone was looking at me. It turns out I was trying to chew and swallow the leaves of an artichoke. which I had never seen before.”.

The discomfort continued when his girlfriend’s parents pushed him beyond what he was used to. They kept requesting their guest “do things they knew were outside my comfort zone, like opening a bottle of champagne. When the cork shot out of the bottle, I almost lost an eye, to everyone else’s amusement.”.

Those scenes connect to what Blankfein says he now feels about raising children with money. After living at both ends of the wealth spectrum. he writes with mixed emotions: “I spend half my time wanting to give stuff to my kids. the other half tormenting them for having stuff I gave them that I didn’t have.”.

Blankfein retired as Goldman’s CEO in 2018 after years of weathering crises, battling the press, wrangling with regulators, flying across the world every few weeks, and even surviving cancer. That last experience shaped how he thought about what mattered once the relentless pace ended.

He wrote that he didn’t want his retirement to be defined by squeezing in one more brief escape. “It couldn’t be about one more weekend when I said goodbye to my family on a Saturday afternoon so I could travel for more than twenty hours to arrive in China for a meeting first thing on Monday. ” he wrote.

Since retiring. Blankfein says he has been free to build a different routine: taking courses in physics and linguistics. perusing military histories and biographies. and taking on other intellectual pursuits. “Being able to pursue my curiosity freely over the last few years has felt like a luxury and a gift. ” he wrote.

Money and investing have also stayed in the picture—but on his terms. He trades his personal account daily because “it’s fun for me to make bets on the market. ” and he offers advice and punditry. He supports nonprofits as well, and he spends more time with his family, exercising, and traveling for leisure.

One guideline, he says, was planted early. Blankfein recalled in his memoir that when he made partner at Goldman. he was advised that his goal in life should be that if his obituary ran nine paragraphs. no more than three of them should be about his time at the firm. “In other words. I was to contribute to the world separately from Goldman and was supposed to have a life after Goldman. ” he writes.

By the sound of it, Blankfein believes he’s doing exactly that—turning the wealth and power he once chased into something else: space to learn, space to give, and the kind of retirement he felt he’d earned after everything he’d survived.

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