Singer Jennifer Lopez has (obviously) achieved a lot of success in her more than 30 years in showbiz. Though she credits her amazing Hollywood career to hard work and determination, Jennifer actually admitted that she wouldn’t be where she is today if it wasn’t for her boyfriend, Alex Rodriguez. While recently appearing on the LinkedIn series, “Conversations With…,” Jennifer explained how Alex helped take her career to the next level.

“It wasn’t until really Alex came into my life and had such a nice grasp of the business world and so much experience in his own life in real estate and in business and dealing with private equity firms and things like that. Deep down I knew that when I made a company almost two billion dollars, and I only came home with literally… it had to be like five percent of that, maybe less. Much less. Yeah, much less than that. That there was something wrong,” she recalled about Alex, 43, helping to change her career.

Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez
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When Alex and Jennifer, 49, started dating nearly two years ago, he gave her some advice that she still remembers today. “You’re the product,” he told the actress at the time. Jennifer was faced with the option of keeping her career exactly the same or to forget everything that she knew about the industry and trust Alex. Jennifer decided to put her faith in him, and she has never regretted it since. 

“What I think I’ve learned and what I’m trying to do now at this point in my life is to say ‘no’ a little bit more and hone it down to like working smarter instead of working all the time,” she said, adding that she now has a new way of doing business.

“I’ve been of the mind a long long time that the way it’s done in Hollywood and the way artists are, you know, kind of handled and taken care of that there was something wrong with the fact that we are the scarce asset and we bring so much to the table and we usually get the smallest piece of the pie,” she said. “Without us, nothing can really happen.”