Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438]
Episode publishedPodcast: Invest Like the Best with Patr...Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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The best operators have a relentless focus on leverage, finding ways to multiply their impact rather than just working harder. But here's what I see happening in finance teams everywhere. Brilliant people getting buried in expense management busy work. If you think about it, you become a finance leader because you love strategic work. Modeling scenarios, optimizing capital allocation, finding the insights that actually move the business forward. But instead, you're chasing receipts and categorizing transactions. It's the opposite of leverage. This is exactly why I'm so bullish on what the team
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Some. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
My guest today is Marc Bertolini. Marc is the former CEO of Aetna and the current CEO of Oscar Health. He shares one of the most extraordinary leadership stories I've ever encountered, surviving a catastrophic ski accident that left him in chronic pain for eighteen years while simultaneously leading one of healthcare's most successful corporate turnarounds. His personal experience navigating his son's life threatening cancer battle and his own medical challenges fundamentally changed his approach to healthcare, leading to innovations in employee welfare that Wall Street initially questioned bu
So I was skiing one day and had gone into the woods and caught an edge looking over my shoulder and hit a tree, broke my neck and slid 60 feet head first down into a river in a coma. I broke five of my vertebrae, macerated my brachial plexus, disconnected my nerve root from my left arm from my spinal cord. It took them two hours to extract me from this ravine I was in. And they medevaced me to a hospital, gave me last rights on the way. I was in a coma for five days. And a friend of mine sent me this ring, this memento mori ring. And he said, Remember, you will die. And when you look in Renais
Can you mention what the Dalai Lama told you in the same vein?
Yeah. So I asked the question
First Dalai Lama reference on the podcast was
How do you react to people who frighten you? Because there's this thing called loving kindness meditation, where you should find a way to meditate about those that you fear. And he said, Well, Mark, in your heart you need to find compassion for the journey they're on. Because everyone has their own journey in life. But physically,
run. And he laughed. It's an incredible, beautiful idea. It is. Going back to the accident, I think there was a crazy detail where the fact that you were in this frozen river was a positive. Can you expand on this insane story?
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