Jennifer Garner, 54, said entering the business world later in her career has made it easier to admit what she doesn’t know.
Speaking on Tuesday’s episode of “Forbes Talks,” the actor said one thing she enjoys about entrepreneurship is getting to be a beginner again.
“I’m learning. This is all new to me. I’d never taken an econ class, a business class. I didn’t know how to read a spreadsheet. They still really overwhelm me, but I sure as heck love the process of being the student in the room, always,” Garner said.
Garner joined organic children’s food company Once Upon a Farm in 2017, two years after its founding, and is now described by the company as a cofounder.
There’s also an upside to becoming an entrepreneur later in life, she said.
“I’m so grateful to be a grown-up in that room and not a kid because I think that I’d need to prove myself. I’d need to say, ‘This is how we should do this, or this is how this should run.’ And I’m blissfully not motivated by needing to be in charge,” Garner said.
Garner said getting older hasn’t dulled her desire to pursue what she wants or take on new challenges.
After years of career success, it can be easy to expect new opportunities to come naturally, but Garner said she still values having something to strive for.
“It’s great to still feel hungry,” she said. “I’m still really hungry.”
Garner said she’s learned to focus on the work and tries not to check the company’s day-to-day stock price.
Instead, she said she’s “wholly focused” on doing the job and trusts that “if we do that, the stock will follow.” Keeping tabs on the stock, she said, would affect her much like reading tabloid coverage about herself.
“I would not do well under that kind of pressure or scrutiny,” she said.
Other celebrities have similarly spoken about starting over as beginners in a new industry.
When Ina Garten bought the Barefoot Contessa store in 1978 with no food-business experience, her husband, Jeffrey, encouraged her to embrace the learning curve.
“Honestly, the first month I was there I thought, ‘This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life,'” Garten said in a 2020 interview. “I’d never been in the food business; I didn’t know how to do anything. But Jeffrey said, ‘If you could do it in the first week, you’d be bored in the second week.”‘
In 2024, Gwyneth Paltrow said she was so unfamiliar with business jargon when she first started Goop that she would Google acronyms under the table during meetings.
“I decided I was going to be really brave around asking questions and that there’s a difference between intelligence and just not having learned something yet,” Paltrow said.
