Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey Book Review

Here it is… GREENLIGHTS by Matthew McConaughey Book Review!

First of all, I’ve always been a huge fan of this man… I’ve seen all the movies, my favorites being “Sahara” & “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days”! When I was in high school my mom and step dad actually MET Matthew and his wife at an event they all attended, Super Service Challenge! (I’ll put a picture below.) My mom said that he was one of the most down to earth people she’d ever met... his wife too.

This book goes on to prove just that. I think it’s incredibly easy for us to look at an actor or actress and just think “yup…they made it” but never really wonder or value how and why. While this book is about McConaughey’s life, travels, failures and successes... there’s a message much more profound hiding between the lines making this not only a memoir of his life but, dare I say… a guide on how to live your own!

In this book, McConaughey talks about “Greenlights”… Greenlights meaning rights of passage, moments we are given permission to go forth. I’m not sure if he intentionally inspires you to look introspectively at the “Greenlights” you’ve been given in your own life by telling you his own but I definitely did. McConaughey is raw, honest and relateable in this book… & not in ways that you would imagine. This is a book about LIVIN’… no “g” on purpose, livin’. If you’re looking for your next entertaining yet weirdly helpful read… look no further. 10/10 recommend!

Greenlights Summary

From the Academy Award®–winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction!

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.”