Mark Ottobre went from last place in his first bodybuilding competition to building a successful personal-training business by reframing the loss and visualizing specific targets: $150 per hour, $4,500 packages, multiple gyms. He argues the right plan beats effort, and that people choose to be victims when they could be victors.
So here you are, you have an event when you're 18 and you give up soccer to help you better at school. You get worse at school, then you judge yourself for making the wrong decision, but the decision ultimately formed your life path of getting into personal training. So what's the problem with Year 12? How do things not work out for you? It sounds like things worked out for you. Yeah, no, but this is the bullshit that we tell ourselves, right? We write our past as, okay, I came last in my very first bodybuilding show. Yeah, I was that guy on stage that you would have laughed at and you would have said he should not be on stage, and you were right, absolutely. But you know what it did for me? At the end of it, I said, fuck it. That was such a hard experience for me that I don't want any other fucker to go through what I had to go through. I put on 14 kilos in 3 days. You wanna talk about body dysmorphic issues? Fuck, I had them coming out of my ears. Yeah. And I had them for a very long time, but you know what? I started getting into NLP that drove me to Dean Martini. That drove me to writing these affirmations. If you came to when I lived at my mom's house, if you came into my bedroom, all over my bedroom, there were little butcher pieces of paper with little affirmations on the wall and beliefs and my values. Do what you love, love what you do. Service, be of value, have impact, wealth. Boom, one corner, the universe is conspiring for my success. The other corner, I'm a healthy person, eats healthy foods, abilities in my body. Here are my goals: being able to charge $150 an hour for personal training. Another goal, being able to charge $4,500 for a personal training package. These are my packages. I'm gonna have this many gyms, I'm gonna have this many trainers, this is what I'm gonna be earning. Everywhere in my room, boom, constantly facing me. That's what I created. Took me 12 years, but I've manifested it. At the tender age of 33, right? A lot faster than what other people do. But I, I, what's the word? What's the word I'm looking for? I immersed myself in it, immersed myself. I didn't go, I didn't believe it wasn't gonna work. There was fucking no way it wasn't gonna work. It was gonna fucking work because I didn't care how long it took. So yes, I changed the story. What do those things mean? Looking back now, all the dots connect. Fuck, of course you came last in your bodybuilding event. You wouldn't have changed any, you wouldn't have trained any of these competitors if you didn't come last. What if I came first that day? I'll tell you what happened if I came first that day. If I came first today, I would have said, fuck, see how good I am? I know everything there is to know about bodybuilding. I'm so fucking good, you know, I'm just gonna compete next year and win again. What growth is there in that? So did things work out for me? I think it worked out pretty well, me coming last. I think it worked out pretty fucking well. Would I have changed coming last? No, I would never. That experience at the time, which I perceived as a very, very negative experience, it left me shattered for weeks because I put everything into it. Everything you could possibly put into it. Starved myself, did twice a day cardio, did twice a day training, did stupid training plans. And I was probably eating like 600 to 800 calories a day for months on end. I didn't care. I thought this is what you had to do. I didn't know any better 'cause that's what I was being told by my coach at the time. It's fucking stupid. But I look at it now and go, yeah, okay, what's great about that? What's great about— tell you what's great about that is you give me a fucking shit plan, I still follow it and get a result. You give me the right plan, I'll fucking blow your mind, right? So I just need to get the right plan. So spend more time getting the right plan so you can be excellent. Same thing with you, Cam. Things— it's, it's, it's Not that things didn't work out for you, it's that you're telling yourself things didn't work out for you. You need to take your power back. Yeah, your power's not out here, your power's in there. So you need to go back, and we just did one, right? We just did one story then about soccer, but I want you to go to the next story that you've been telling yourself and find how did it work out for you. Because I tell you now, it did work out for you. You're just telling yourself a bullshit story that it didn't work, and that's all it is, it's fucking bullshit. Okay, it did work out. It's up to you to see the dots because you can either be the victim of your life or the victor. It's your choice. And you know what? No one in this room is gonna lose sleep if you choose to be the victim. No one, no one cares. You wanna be the victim? Be the victim. No one cares. The world doesn't care and no one will care. No one will care about Cam and the impact that you could make on this world. No, but it's true. No one will care. You think, you think, oh, people should be more caring and empathy. No, they don't give a fuck. Right? But you step up and you start being of value to people, then people will care. And that comes with you being the victor, not the victim, because you're not going to get there being the victim. So you have to rewrite your life story in accordance to everything does work out for you. I'm going to see it no matter what happens from this day forward. Things do work out for me, and I'm going to be dedicated to actually seeing it, that it works out for me.
