Greenlights

by Matthew McConaughey

Number of pages: 304

Publisher: Crown

BBB Library: Booklets

ISBN: 978-0593139134



About the Author

Academy Award–winning actor Matthew McConaughey is a married man, a father of three children, and a loyal son and brother. He considers himself a storyteller by occupation.

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Editorial Review

I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me. Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges—how to get relative with the inevitable—you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights.”

Book Reviews

Greenlights is not a memoir, though it tells true stories fromMcConaughey's life in chronological order. Nor is it “an advice book”. It is “an approach book”.

It is a book that is constantly evaluating itself and its reasons for being, much like its author. He acknowledges that he entered the project both eagerly and warily, looking to use his celebrity for the opportunity to tell his story in his own idiosyncratic way.

McConaughey’s self-effacing slacker-cool attitude, which lets him casually drop a few thousand on the hapless Buffalo Bills in the Super Bowl, has made him an ideal masculine movie hero for our anxious moment. The world is on fire, but he has got you.

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Wisdom to Share

The best way to get through life is by getting relative to the inevitable.

I believe that everything we do is part of a plan- even if things don’t go the way you intend.

The red lights of yesterday will become the greenlights of today. What goes down will come up.

As the weeks stretched on, I needed to find my footing, a discipline I could dedicate myself to so I could keep my sanity.

On that trip, I was forced to look inside myself, to make sense of what was going on around me.

They were the last words I expected to hear, and the best ones.

It is time to turn “I would if I could” to “I can and I am

Ibelieve the truth is always around us, but we don’t always see it.

It was time to make a real sacrifice, see what I could really live without.

We all want to succeed. The question is, what does success look like to us?