In a former life: Mark Wattles
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In a former life: Mark Wattles

The current issue of Inc magazine has a profile of Hollywood Video CED Mark Wattles, 39, in a column called "In a former life." Wattles runs the $757-million chain of 1,322 video stores which is headquartered in Wilsonville, Oregon.

In a former life, Wattles served an LDS mission. He says that his mission taught him important lessons that helped him later in life, "It taught me self-motivation and perseverance in a challenging, unstructured environment. It also taught me how to hear 'no' and stay positive.

"That was useful-years later-in 1993, when I was trying to go public. I knew I needed the cash to grow fast or I'd end up having to sell to Blockbuster. But we had only 15 stores. We were wondering how to get underwriters to return our phone calls."

Wattles recalls his mission as a lesson in perserverance, "People are rejecting you left and right, but you go on saying `I've got a job to do' to yourself. When I was a missionary, I might spend two weeks knocking on doors before I got a yes, yet it would just seem so great when it happened. It's been almost 20 years, and I could still tell you the story of every single yes I heard."