Citi analyst who burned out aged 24 says she was only in it for the money
Burnout is a well-known problem in banking. In between the long hours and the genuinely unfulfilling work, it’s easy to ask: what’s this all for?
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Speaking to Lazo Cetnik, CEO of Pretraga Partners, on the Merger Talks podcast, former Citi investment banking analyst Vitoria Okuyama was frank about what brought her to finance. “When I was 17,” she recalled, “I qualified for the US Open, and I couldn't go. Because I didn't have the money.”
She was never the same after that. “I always had the motivation that I never wanted money to stop me from doing anything again,” she explained. “When I heard about investment banking, at the time, it was the highest paying job that I knew of. It was a no-brainer. I didn’t care about what I had to do or what it looked like,” she said. “It was definitely the money motivation for me.”
Okuyama was a talented tennis player in her teens, at one point ranking 118th in the world. After lacking the money to progress in tennis, banking seemed the only way forward.
“The hours were pretty brutal,” she said. “I was working from 10am to 10pm for months in a row.” Burnout came not too long after. After a brief holiday back home in Brazil for carnival she faced a particularly brutal patch of work – “three months in a row, from 10am until 4am every day” – which she began hours after taking a red eye flight.
For Okuyama, burnout meant aggression against those close to you, confusion about your own behavior, and eventually panic attacks. She was like a frog in hot water. “The main thing I should have done was taken time out earlier. I realized that I never fully recovered until I took time off,” she said. “When you cross that line, you cannot just go back to normal. You truly need to stop and recover, and it’s easier to repair than to rebuild.”
As we’ve noted before, Okuyama’s recovery process eventually took her to Peru and involved yoga and Ayahuasca. She was eventually refused promotion to associate and became an influencer. Maybe she will make a lot of money there instead.
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