Actor, professor, entrepreneur and self-described outlaw Matthew McConaughey turned his 35 years of journals into one of the most distinctive works of reflection that I have seen. Part handbook, part memoir, part scrapbook and part motivational speech, the book Greenlights is themed around his quest to catch as many greenlights as possible during his life.
While everyone loves when circumstances align to give us greenlights, and McConaughey’s antics throughout the years have helped him achieve many of them, the real lessons come in when greenlights are “disguised as yellow and red lights. A caution, a detour, a thoughtful pause, an interruption, a disagreement, indigestion, sickness, and pain. A full stop, a jackknife, an intervention, failure, suffering, a slap in the face, death. We don’t like yellow and red lights…They say no, but sometimes give us what we need.”
McConaughey believes that we can become responsible for creating more greenlights in our lives sometimes through timing, hard work, or even fate – but more likely by realizing that not everything works out as we intended it to. The more accepting we are of the yellows and reds and the lessons they can teach us, the more likely those setbacks will create opportunities in the future. His three and a half decades of reflection have helped him “catch more yeses in a world of nos.”
He writes: “I’ve always believed that the science of satisfaction is about learning when, and how, to get a handle on the challenges we face in life.” Whether through journaling, jotting notes on napkins, adding commentary to your work notebook, or engaging in meditation, be like Mr. McConaughey and intentionally learn from what goes your way and what doesn’t. It’s the secret sauce that allows the red lights to eventually turn green.
Source: Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey, Crown Publishers, 2020
