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Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey - A Book about Living Life a Little Different (and a little happier)

Book Description:

I’ve been in this life for 50 years, been trying to work out its riddle for 42, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last 35. 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.”

So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops.

Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.

It’s a love letter. To life.

It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights - and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green, too.

Good luck. - Matthew McConaughey

My Top Takeaways:

  • Things, events, and people that feel like red lights right now, even the really big and scary ones, are likely to be viewed as green lights in our personal evolution if we keep moving forward.
  • We can become really good at something and still decide we want to do something else... and then we can become the best in that new field too. We aren't stuck just because we've done something long enough to become good at it.
  • Do hard things on purpose. Getting bored with life can take away from our purpose and lead us to do "stupid things" to fill the void.
  • The world is contriving to make us happy. Believing this makes it true!
  • To get something we need, we have to change our "need" to a "want" in our minds. Desperation leads us to limited thinking and is visible to other people. It doesn't look good on anyone.
  • An act of kindness can, and often does, change people's lives - including our own.
  • Don't walk into a place like you wanna buy it, walk in like you already own it.
  • When we mentally give a person, place, or point in time more credit than ourselves we create a fictitious ceiling.
  • Throughout life, we need to continue asking what our definition of success is. It's possible our definition changed, multiple times even, and we are still pursuing an old definition of success.
  • Be different. It's fun, leads to increased opportunities, and takes less effort than acting like everyone else.

    'The 52 Book' Review Rating:

    Final Thoughts:

    I had to listen to this one instead of reading it. How could anyone not want to listen to Matthew McConaughey reads his own book?!

    This is not the book you read and walk away with a laundry list of strategies or processes that you need to change. This is the book you read, laugh along with, and tell your friends about. It's also the book that leaves you wondering if you're doing enough to live a successful life, or maybe you're doing too much, or maybe you just need to drop everything and take a trip to the Amazon River after waking from a wet dream (you need to read the book to get that one...). 

    Greenlights is a fun book, written by a wildly interesting guy, that inspired me to look at challenges in my life a little differently than I had before. I've already recommended it to a few friends and have a feeling this is one I will continue to share with people through the years when they need a pick-me-up or encouragement to break the mold that they feel stuck in.

    Do you love learning and want to hear about future books?

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    Have you read (or listened to) Greenlights, and if so, what are your thoughts? 

    Also, I am always on the prowl for my next great book. What life-changing books have you read recently? I'm excited to see your comments below.


    You can reach out to David Inman at: david@kennected.io 
    You can also connect with him on LinkedIn at: 

    Location: Indianapolis, IN, USA

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