Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

Greenlights Summary in 10 Words

Get relative with the inevitable. Just keep livin’. I Value…

High 5: Main Ideas and Key Points

1. “Greenlights mean go—advance, carry on, continue. On the road, they are set up to give the flow of traffic the right of way, and when scheduled properly, more vehicles catch more greenlights in succession. They say proceed.” And we are responsible for making, being ready, and catching our own greenlights.
2. Our lives are shaped by our values – we need to understand ourselves before we can understand the world—get introspective.
3. Death is coming for all of us, but how we get there is up to us: life is relative.
4. Sometimes we have to take a step back to go forward.
5. Stop being impressed with life, moments, and things, and start getting involved in the process. Live to learn.

Greenlights Summary in 4 Sentences

1. Matthew McConaughey takes us on a ride through his life and memories—from youth to today—starting as an exchange student in Australia where, what could have been the worst experience of his life, turned out to be the one that shaped everything.
2. His journal entries over the past 30-plus years guide us through his thoughts, introspections, musings, poems, and life advice on creating a life centered around values and doing what is right to get where we want to go.
3. From the jungles of the Amazon to villages in Africa, on the road in America to the shiny stardom of Hollywood, he intertwines his real, honest, and deep wisdom with how he dealt with his rapid rise to fame, having the discipline to step back from it all to find silence, so he could hear himself.
4. Life is just a process of moments and he outlines some of his biggest, more influential and pivotal moments to really say one thing: death is coming for us all, and choosing to live with values is what makes for a meaningful life.

Top 3 Quotes

1. “Don’t half-ass it.”
2. Poem—Making Love: “Today I made love to my woman. Not because I wanted to right then, but because I knew I’d want to once we started. And the walk on the beach we took afterward would be more romantic. The cocktail I made at 5:45 would taste better. The shrimp I seasoned would have more flavor. The All-Star game we watched at 7:00 would be more exciting. The music we danced to till midnight would have more rhythm. And the conversation about life we had together sitting across the kitchen table from each other until 3:00 in the morning would be more inspiring…and it was.”
3. My favorite quote: “I never cared much for destinations. The idea of landing is too finite for my imagination and sense of song. Give me a direction and a sixteen-lane highway with room to swerve and explore along the way. Like jazz, I prefer to see life like a river.”
4. Bonus: “I found myself right where I left me.”

2 Ways Greenlights Will Change You

1. This book has a way of forcing you to turn inward—to question yourself and your ways. To look at your life and ask, “Is this really what I want?”
2. It will make you question the things that don’t belong in your life – things to remove, cut down on, omit—and that can make all the difference.

1 Thing To Implement After Reading This Greenlights Summary

1. Immediately, create a list of Values—it can be as many as you want; I have nine on my list – and stick that list on a wall where you will see it every single day. Then let those values inform all of your decisions. For example, my number two value is “Health”. So, when junk food passes in front of me, I easily say “No”. Problem solved.

The Rating Explained

There may be a slight bias toward his free-spirited, travel-the-world, and explorative nature, but I couldn’t help but relate to that. I listened to this as an audiobook, and he did a great job performing the book. McConaughey is a talented writer and this book showcased his skills. I enjoyed the intertwining of life lessons with life advice and “bumperstickers” to bigger-picture events. As a standalone, it could get 5-Stars, but when comparing it to some other top-tier biographies out there, this one reaches 4.5-Stars: Great, out of 5. Hey, it’s all relative.

Who Should Read It?

• Without a doubt, if you like McConaughey this one will be right up your alley. He is an entertaining writer. His style is uniquely his own and comes off as authentic and natural. If you want life advice from a very famous movie star, you’ll love this one.
• Anyone who likes a travel-related, life-advice tale will love this.

Greenlights Summary, Review, and Notes

My summaries are organized by common ideas and threads not by chapter. I have found this to greatly benefit understanding and recall. They also include the essential lessons and key passages from the book. My Summary, Quotes, Notes, and Thoughts follow:

Poetry and Musings

• The Justice it Deserves: “To appreciate a place fully a man must know that he can live there. When all his discomforts disappear and he lets himself be owned by the place, he needs to customize and localize himself to the place he visits, to the degree that he knows that he could live there forever, then and only then is it acceptable for him to leave. Wherever you are, give the place the Justice it deserves.”
• Making Love: “Today I made love to my woman. Not because I wanted to right then, but because I knew I’d want to once we started. And the walk on the beach we took afterward would be more romantic. The cocktail I made it 5:45 would taste better. The shrimp I seasoned would have more savor. The All-Star game we watched at 7:00 would be more exciting. The music we danced to till midnight would have more rhythm. And the conversation about life we had together sitting across the kitchen table from each other until 3:00 in the morning would be more inspiring.. and it was.”
• Selfish: “When I’m rich enough to not care about the money. When a child’s life is more important than my own. When my self-worth isn’t reliant on the adulation of others. When I don’t care anymore, to outsource my desires, I look near and within, and get self-ish. This is the measure of a man’s greatness, when a man becomes classic. When mortal rewards are no longer enough to pay his rent, man becomes legend. Fish for yourself. Self-ish.”
• Friends: “While we’re here, where we believe more than know, we enjoy succeeding. We don’t have to look over our shoulders when we keep our own council, writing our book, the star of our story, traveling toward immortal finish lines, where we make friends with ourselves.”

Greenlights Summary Quick Hitters: From the Beginning

• “We all step in s***: it’s either learning how to deal with it or learning how to do it less often.”
• “The sole objective is the pursuit of a singular finish with only the arrival in sight. This is what brings us together.”
• “Sometimes you’ve got to go back to go forward. To see where you came from, where you’ve been, how you got here.”
• “The arrival is inevitable, death…The approach is relative, life.”
• We can catch greenlights, which are all the good things in life that tell us to keep going.
• We can create our own and, sometimes, it’s just life and luck.
• Persist, pivot, or concede those are our only three choices. It’s up to us, our choice, every time.
• “Words are momentary, intent is momentous.”
• “Earn your Saturdays. We need discipline. Once we get knowledge of the space and the place and the craft then we can let our freak flag fly. Creativity needs borders. Individuality needs resistance. Without all this, there’s only chaos. We need discipline to have freedom.” (This is the key for me.)
• “You believe in luck, you believe in God.”
• “Process of Elimination: the way we find ourselves is not asking Who We Are, but Who We Are not. Once we remove the things that we don’t want, we have more options that fit Who We Are and things become much clearer.” Elimination is hard for many of us today, and it starts with removing distractions.
• Make a judgment and then choose. And don’t waiver.
• You have to find a way to get introspective. You need to understand yourself, and what’s going on inside you. It’s the only way.
• The future is the monster, the unknown, the Dragon yet untamed. The monster always sees us coming, “so we should lift our heads, look it in the eye, and watch it heed.”

Find Your Frequency: Getting Started in the Biz

• “Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”
• Live what you believe: Live the questions first, then what you believe.
• “When we know what we want to do, knowing when to do it is the hard part.”
• The Greatest Salesman in the World: I will form good habits and become their slave. (I need to read this book…it’s not the first time I’ve heard the title.)
• DON’T HALF-ASS IT.
• Earn belief in myself first then with others.
• The Greenlights summary common denominator of man: Values.
• Engage with yourself, then engage with the world.
• “Cool never tries. Cool just is.”
• One in a row: any success takes one in a row. Do one thing well then do it again over and over and over.
• Play so well that it’s undeniable.
• Ask yourself if you want to before you do it.
• “The intellect is not supposed to make things more confusing. It’s supposed to expose the truth more clearly and reveal more of the obvious to reveal more lines of sight. It should simplify things not make them more cerebral.”

On His Way Up the Hollywood Ranks

• “We have to prepare for the job so we can be free to do the work.”
• It’s not what we do it’s what we don’t do as well.
• “We don’t get what we want most often because we quit too early or we don’t take the necessary risk to get it.”
• “We Are All Made for every moment. Whether the moment makes us or we make the moment.”
• Don’t let the moment be greater than myself. Less impressed with the moment, more involved in the moment.
• Who are we to think we don’t deserve it?
• I find this above point so meaningful and needed to include it in this Greenlights summary: many of us so often feel (consciously or unconsciously) that we don’t deserve what we want. But who are we to think that we don’t deserve it?
• The approach is the destination.
• There is no goal line because there is no destination.
• “When we truly latch onto the fact that we are going to die at some point in time we have more presence in this one.”
• Death: this is definitely one of the major throughlines of the self-improvement arena from this book to Mark Manson’s writing all the way back to Marcus Aurelius. We are all going to die at some point, so live a meaningful life that you enjoy.

Stepping Back From Hollywood

• A Walkabout: We need to find silence to hear ourselves. Find the one person that we are stuck with, ourselves.
• Sometimes we just need to hear that we’re not the only ones.
• My best self is always there. I just have to listen. He is insatiable.
• “Do not invent drama, it will come on its own.”
• “A man addicted to ideas needs to be intervened with starvation. A man addicted to truths may be fed.”
• Very interesting part about him floating down the Amazon River and having a wet dream: have to put that in this Greenlights summary!
• “Sometimes we have to leave what we know to find out what we know.”
• Embrace only what I can see in front of me.
• “How do we know when we cross a truth or a truth crosses us? The truth, the answers are around us all the time. But we don’t always grasp them, because we’re not in the right place to. We have to make a plan.”
• “Find the truth, fan the flames, keep it lit, be with it. Then comes the hard part, taking it and living it. Make it an active part of who we are. For what we want is what we need. What we need is what we want.”
• I definitely relate to this part where he just gets a camper van and cruises the US. That’s the life for me. Freedom.
• Greenlights summary favorite quote: “I never cared much for destinations. The idea of landing is too finite for my imagination and sense of song. Give me a direction and a sixteen-lane highway with room to swerve and explore along the way. Like jazz, I prefer to see life like a river.”
• “Common sense is like money and health: once you have it you got to work to keep it.”
• “My days of it’d be rude not to and I don’t have to, so I will, let to many a morning of I don’t knows and let’s not remember. You know how it is, when you’re up to nothin no good’s usually next.”
• “Sometimes which choice you make it’s not as important as making a choice and committing to it.”
• It’s not about right or wrong. It’s about do you understand?
• Nothing is unbelievable. Don’t deny it. Depend on it. Expect it. Believe it.
• “It’s not about win or lose. It’s about do you accept the challenge?”
• “I’m good at what I love. I don’t love all that I am good at.”
• “I’ve never had any trouble turning the page in the book of my life.”
• You are the author of the book of your life. Turn the page.

Love and Family

• “The arrow doesn’t seek the target. The target draws the arrow. We don’t always need to try to make things happen. Our souls are infinitely magnetic.”
• If you find yourself impressed with something become more involved in that something.
• “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate… the great man is not all to each, he is each to all. The genius can do anything but does one thing at a time.”
• “If thine eye be single, thy whole body will be full of light – Matthew 6:22
• “Life-like architecture is a verb. If designed well it works, it’s beautiful and it needs no directions. It needs maintenance.”
• The three things that will give your life meaning and shake you to your core:

1. Death
2. Family crisis
3. Newborns

• What matters? It all does…Our choices matter. It’s not all for nothing. It’s all for everything.
• “Once you know it’s black, it’s not near as dark.”
• When you have a daughter: “The only honeymoon that lasts forever.”
• Define success for yourself. What is success to me?
• “Two constants you can rely on: time and truth. One shows up the first time every time and the other never leaves.”
• Places are like people. They each have a particular identity. A soul.

Greenlights Summary Final Lessons

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Other Books by Matthew McConaughey

• Greenlights: Your Journal, Your Journey (Hardcover Journal)

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