Every time someone discusses Jessica Alba, something is missed. Almost invariably, the topic of Dark Angel, the Honest Company, or magazine covers comes up first. Seldom does anyone take the time to inquire about how she truly got there, what her educational background was, and why it didn’t resemble what most people would anticipate from someone who built such a large life.
Born in Pomona, California, in 1981, Jessica Alba moved around a lot as a child due to her father’s work in the Air Force. By the time she was nine, she had moved to Mississippi, Texas, and finally Claremont, California. Deep friendships and regular education are not conducive to that type of childhood. It teaches you to be self-sufficient and quick to adjust.
Her health made things more difficult. Before she was a teenager, Alba suffered from tonsillar cysts, ruptured appendices, collapsed lungs twice, and pneumonia several times a year. She was actually cut off from her peers because she spent so much time in hospitals. Nobody was familiar enough with her to make friends. That isn’t a press release exaggeration. Her early years were exactly like that.
Nevertheless, at the age of eleven, she persuaded her mother to take her to a Beverly Hills acting competition. She was awarded free acting lessons. She had an agent nine months later. It’s possible that those acting classes served as her first actual classroom, a place where she at last felt like she belonged.
At the age of sixteen, Alba graduated from California’s Claremont High School. That occurred while she was already working professionally as a young actress, which puts her two years ahead of the average American student. There was just no traditional school to attend on some productions, such as the Australian television series Flipper. Home-study programs accounted for the majority of her education during those years, not because she was having difficulties but rather because the work never stopped.
She chose not to attend college after graduating. Rather, she joined the Atlantic Theater Company, a rigorous and serious acting school co-founded by playwright David Mamet and William H. Macy. That decision reveals something about her perspective on education. She had no intention of pursuing a diploma for its own sake. The real skill was what she was pursuing. She appeared to recognize the difference earlier than most people her age.
There was no short cut with the Atlantic Theater Company. Mamet takes a strict, text-driven approach to acting, necessitating a discipline that doesn’t reward coasting. By most accounts, the training there was extremely difficult. Alba received direct instruction from Macy and his spouse, Felicity Huffman, which is a type of mentoring that doesn’t have a grade but usually has greater significance over time.
What she created after all of that is worth sitting with. She co-founded the Honest Company in 2012, and in a matter of years, it was valued at almost $1 billion. For more than ten years, she was its chief creative officer. Regardless of how one views her decision to forego a traditional college education in favor of piecing together her education through acting workshops, studios, and sets, it was evidently successful.
It’s difficult to ignore the pattern. Her approach to both her career and her business seems to consistently exhibit the same adaptability that came from moving between states as a child, the same self-reliance that developed through all those hospital stays and missed school days. Not all educational experiences take place in the places you anticipate. For Alba, a lot of it took place in spaces that most people would never enter.
