Why dying can help you realize that you don't enjoy private equity
Shakespeare said that a coward dies “many times” before their death. The brave, meanwhile, “never taste of death but once.” If you’re a private equity VP, you fit somewhere in the middle of those extremes.
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That was EQT vice president Louis Marchetti’s experience of things, at least. In May 2019, Marchetti died in the gym, mid-workout. He promptly came back to life, with the assistance of some of his paramedically-inclined fellow gym-goers.
“I was 200 pounds, about 6’6”, my bodyfat was around 9%, and my resting heartrate was 36,” Marchetti told The Examined Life Podcast with Khe Hy. “I felt like I was just cruising life. I thought I was unstoppable. I was invincible.” For context, the world record (if you could call it such a thing) low resting heart rate is 27 beats per minute (BPM). The author of this article, a physically active 28-year-old, measured himself on the day of writing with an Apple Watch at 70bpm while resting.
Despite the extreme dedication to the fitness lifestyle, no amount of endurance training could compensate for a poorly-lived life. “How I lived my life and how I approached my life did contribute to what happened,” Marchetti said. “And I didn’t really want to recognize or come to grips with this for a long time.”
The core issue, he said, was the lack of agency he exerted. “If I look back on it now, was it really my own life?” Marchetti asked. “I was doing all the things I thought I should do. I was going about it in a way of ‘if I do these things, people will accept me.’ At the end of the day, most of us want to belong and be accepted.” The social proof can be deadly. “People would be like, this guy’s killing it. It was actually killing me, in retrospect,” Marchetti said.
What changed his life? Some “mystics” in Santa Fe. “They wouldn’t call themselves that,” Marchetti admitted. “One of them was a voice alchemist.” Voice alchemist Consuelo Luz says that the practice is “the use of wordless vocalization to find what needs to be expressed by the body, matching the frequency of crystallized patterns and hidden emotions in order to release them and restore a healthy flow of energy.” Mystical indeed.
The voice alchemist chanted, played some music, lit a candle, and then began working through Marchetti’s chakras. “I went to this other place,” Marchetti said. “There was this pillar of fire up through the sky, through outer space… We were done, and it felt like five minutes. It was an hour.”
The alchemist described what she saw while travelling through the private equity professional’s body. “I saw your heart,” she said, without prior knowledge of his cardiac arrest. “I saw a broken heart, a heart that had been hurt in the past.” It was this conversation, and not the cardiac arrest specifically, that set Marchetti’s heart away from finance.
“Almost two years to the day [of the heart attack], I was fired. Twelve years into the job,” Marchetti said. “That was the ego kill right there… When I heard the words, I felt the weight of the world come off my shoulders. It was just an incredible relief.”
A seven-month transition period later, Marchetti felt grateful for being fired, rather than angry. He realized that he wanted to quit but never would have had the heart to do it himself. “I cannot tell you how many 45-year-old, usually men, senior executives at banks and hedge funds and private equity funds wish they just got fired.”
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