PDF Summary:Greenlights, by Matthew McConaughey
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1-Page PDF Summary of Greenlights
Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights is not a conventional memoir. As he neared age 50, the Oscar-winning actor revisited the journal that he had kept for the previous 35 years to see what he could learn from it. The result is this book, which combines hard-earned insights about the art of living with vivid accounts of McConaughey’s upbringing in rural Texas, his adventures in the movie business, his global travels, and his lifelong search for love and fatherhood. Part autobiography and part life-guide, Greenlights both explains and illustrates McConaughey’s philosophy of “catching greenlights”—recognizing and even creating those moments when life says “yes” and you cruise into success as you pursue your destiny. It’s valuable reading for anyone in search of an entertaining manual on finding your way in the world.
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One morning in the rainforest, after a long night of struggling to understand his identity, he awoke feeling strangely energized. Taking a walk, he came across a beautiful kaleidoscope of butterflies pulsing in formation on the jungle floor. Then he noticed the Amazon just past them. That day, he floated naked in the Amazon on his back, just like in the dream. The feeling of being cleansed and forgiven remained for the rest of his trip. Once, he thought he saw a mermaid’s tail wave at him from the river. His Amazon experience was a greenlight.
On the Road
On returning to Hollywood, Matthew wanted to continue exploring the world, so he bought a van and an RV and became an RV “full-timer,” criss-crossing the United States. He also continued with his movie career, taking meetings with directors on the road.
The Art of Bongoing Naked
After three years on the road, Matthew felt a craving for a more settled lifestyle. He ended his RV-days by renting a two-bedroom house in Austin, and it was here that one of the most notorious incidents in his life took place: his arrest when two Austin police officers barged into his apartment while he was smoking pot and playing the bongos naked. After he had spent the night in jail, a sympathetic judge dismissed all charges in return for a guilty plea for violating a sound ordinance. Matthew had to fight off gloomy feelings that day because his outlaw logic said getting caught was the worst outcome. For consolation, he called his mother, who bolstered him with her outrage at his mistreatment. He received her words as a greenlight and decided to claim the incident as part of his life journey.
Hollywood Hedonism
In 2000, Matthew felt it was time to return to the Hollywood hustle. When he accepted a high-paying offer to star opposite Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner, he entered the world of romantic comedies and a period of white-hot Hollywood excess. He moved into that legendary home to rising (and falling) stars, the Chateau Marmont, where for 18 months he enjoyed a life of hedonistic indulgence filled with late nights, endless parties, and endless friends (many of them female).
Africa and the Dogon
This period ended when Matthew had an exact repeat of his wet dream from several years earlier. This time, he pursued its meaning to Africa, where he protected his anonymity by saying his name was David. While there, he received a bracing lesson when he took sides in an argument between two men and found himself criticized by both, who told him that such confrontations aren’t about who’s “right” or “wrong” but about understanding. Matthew recognized in this a different way of communication than what Americans are used to, one based not on trying to win arguments but on trying to understand the other person.
Still pursuing his dream’s meaning, he visited the Dogon, a people in the Bandiagara Escarpment who had purportedly received knowledge from extraterrestrials long ago. In one village, the champion wrestler challenged Matthew to a match. Matthew accepted, and for two brutal rounds he held his own. When the chief declared it a tie, the villagers chanted enthusiastically, “Daouda!” (“David” in their local dialect). Matthew’s guide later told him that winning against such an opponent was really just about accepting the challenge. Matthew took this as another greenlight.
Turn the Page
When he returned to Los Angeles, Matthew realized he now had no tolerance for the Chateau’s glittery life. So he left and headed for the beach, where he lived for the next few years, trading fancy suits for shorts and a surfboard as he starred in a slew of romantic comedies. This was the period when the media rebranded him as the shirtless rom-com guy. It was fun, but after a while he began to feel as if he had become an entertainer instead of an actor. The rom-coms no longer nourished his creative spirit. He felt more deepened from his traveling than from his career. Looking for change and growth, he bought a house in the Hollywood Hills with a big yard and enough living space for a family. From one of his friends, the late Darrel Royal, football coach at the University of Texas, Matthew had learned that when you need a change, you can always “turn the page” of your life. It was this kind of page-turning transition that Matthew felt he needed.
Discovering Destiny
Almost as if on schedule, Matthew had another non-sexual wet dream: He was an 88-year-old man being visited by 22 young women, each bringing with her four children. He recognized that these were women he had loved and children he had fathered, one child for each year of his life. The dream was a greenlight, because when he woke up, he realized that whether or not he ever met and married the woman of his dreams, he could still know love and father children—his lifelong dream. He could surrender to life and trust it to do the right thing.
Meeting Camila
It was after this greenlight of surrender that the right woman showed up. Matthew met Camila in 2006 and felt instantly enraptured by her. They discovered right away that they could enjoy being quiet together just as easily as talking. It was the start of a whirlwind romance. To Matthew, it felt as if the mermaid from the Amazon ten years earlier had swum up from South America to find him. It was one of the biggest greenlights of his life.
Making a Baby
Matthew and Camila started a new life together by moving into his RV. They also started trying to get pregnant. When it happened, they cried tears of joy together. For Matthew, becoming a father was the validation of his core values, the ultimate affirmation of the transition to manhood that he had earned from his father. It was another greenlight.
When Camila was six months pregnant, Matthew realized that he needed to focus more on this new center of his life, so he shut down his film production company and record label to devote more attention to his family, his acting, and a foundation that he had started.
Becoming a Father
Matthew’s and Camila’s baby boy was born on July 7, 2008, at 6:22 p.m. Matthew’s favorite Bible verse was Matthew 6:22, so they named their son Levi, the other name for the biblical Matthew. The birth and the naming were both greenlights.
Shortly after this, they decided to move to Texas to be nearer to Kay and because Matthew wanted to raise their children there. They bought a home and nine acres on the edge of Austin. At the same time, Matthew realized that the acting roles coming his way weren’t satisfying. Strangely, his movie characters felt less vibrant than his real life. He knew it was time for another change, some kind of authentic sacrifice—especially since Camila was pregnant again.
Unbranded and Rediscovered
In Fall 2008, Matthew checked on his finances to verify whether he and his family could survive an income disruption. Then, having discussed the matter with Camila, he stopped accepting roles in romantic comedies. Over the next year, dozens of offers came in, but he declined them all. During this time, Camila gave birth to their second child. They named her Vida. For Matthew, her birth was a pure greenlight. But around the same time, the offers from Hollywood started drying up. Eventually, after 20 months of Matthew’s refusals, none came in at all.
Then something magical happened: New offers started pouring in. Matthew’s long absence had “unbranded” him, and now it seemed an inventive move to offer him grittier lead roles in the likes of Magic Mike and Killer Joe. The offers swelled to a flood, and suddenly Matthew was back in business. In one of his ultimate career greenlights, Hollywood “rediscovered” him.
Dallas Buyers Club and the McConaissance
Back in 2007, Matthew had gained control of the Dallas Buyers Club screenplay and had nursed a desire to play the lead role of Ron Woodroof ever since. Now his “rediscovery” made this a viable idea. When Dallas Buyers Club was released in 2013 to a burst of Oscar buzz, this only added momentum to a term the press had started using some months earlier: The McConaissance. Unbeknownst to anybody but Matthew, this was actually a word that he had made up himself and fed to a journalist at that year’s Sundance Film Festival.
The Adventure of Marriage
Although Matthew and Camila had moved in together and started a family, they had not yet talked about marriage. When Levi was three, he asked Matthew why he, his sister Vida, and Matthew all had the last name McConaughey but their mother didn’t. This led Matthew to realize that it was high time he got over his fear of marriage. After a conversation with his pastor helped him understand marriage not as a final destination but a new journey, Matthew proposed to Camila in 2011.
They held the ceremony in 2012 amid a three-day weekend celebration at their house, surrounded by 88 of their closest friends. For Matthew, their marriage was a greenlight. He felt that he now had even more of a future ahead of him, even more to live for.
Their third child, a son, Livingston Alves McConaughey, was born on December 28, 2012. It was another greenlight. Matthew felt more fulfilled than he ever had before. Whereas ideas had always inspired him before, now he felt inspired by life itself.
Winning the Oscar
At the same time, Matthew’s professional career was seriously heating up. In 2014 he swept the Critics’ Choice, Golden Globes, Independent Spirit, Screen Actors Guild, and Academy Awards for best actor for his portrayal of Ron Woodroof. This seemed a validation of all the risky and difficult career choices he had made in recent years.
Being Matthew McConaughey
In the wake of his Oscar win, he made many more movies. When he realized that his movie roles felt more vital to him than his real life, he knew it was time yet again for a change. It was time to turn his life into his favorite movie—to write his own script and direct his own story. It was time to catch the hero that he had always been chasing: his future self. It was time to live his legacy now—to quit acting like Matthew McConaughey and simply be Matthew McConaughey.
To do this, he gathered the scraps of his lifelong journal and created this book, combing through his resume and experiences and drawing out the insights that had formed him. As he was finishing the book in 2020, both the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd rocked the world. Matthew is convinced that at some point in the future, the red light of 2020 will turn green and reveal it as one of our greatest years, as values are intrinsically nondenominational and bipartisan (a lesson his parents taught him). In a world where so many people are divided, he says values are what unite us.
Ultimately, in Matthew’s view, the art of living goes back to the concept of greenlights. As you make choices in life and seek to catch greenlights, think about the way these choices will shape your eventual eulogy. Living this way is the surest way to fill your experience with one greenlight after another.
The McConaughey Way
Enduring lessons that Matthew drew from all of these experiences include the following. These are all insights that you can apply to your own life resume to get relative with your inevitabilities and start catching more greenlights:
- Words are values that create expectations and consequences, so use them carefully.
- The first step in learning who you are is to learn who you aren’t.
- Discover your personal “frequency,” your core of identity, and hold onto it.
- We’re here not to merely tolerate each other’s differences, but to celebrate them.
- To become an adult, and to achieve more success, you have to become less impressed with and more involved with your achievements, career, and relationships.
- Sometimes what’s important is just to make a choice—any choice—and stick with it.
- If you feel stuck in a rut, know that you have the power to change. Your life is a book, and you’re the author. You can turn the page.
- You have to define success for yourself unless you want other people to define it for you.
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PDF Summary Introduction
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You can get better at “catching” greenlights. You do this by identifying your red lights (see below) and then changing your course to avoid them. You can also “earn” greenlights through skillful living. And you can catch them through good timing, good luck, intuition, karma, and pure fate. Although you often stumble into green lights through sheer luck, you can get better at catching them through skillful living (practicing relativity toward the inevitable).
You can also catch more greenlights by identifying and dealing properly with red or yellow lights. These show up as detours, interruptions, illnesses, and sometimes full-blown failure. We don’t like yellow and red lights, but sometimes we recognize later that they were exactly what we needed in a given situation, because they eventually led us to a greenlight.
In dealing with a red light, you have three choices:
- Push and persist against the barrier.
- Pivot to approach the barrier differently (swerving to catch a greenlight as described above).
- Surrender and accept the full stop.
The Art of Living
Greenlights are connected to inevitability and relativity. **The art of living is to understand how and when...
PDF Summary Part 1: Growing Up McConaughey
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Jim and Kay were together as a couple for a very long time before they got married. When they finally did take the plunge, it was because Kay handed Jim an invitation to their own wedding and told him he had 24 hours to decide.
It was a difficult relationship. Although they loved each other passionately, over the years they divorced and remarried each other twice. As two equally strong-willed people, when they argued, they did so vigorously and sometimes physically. On four separate occasions, Jim broke Kay’s middle finger when she stuck it in his face.
One night, Jim came home from work and soon got into an enormous fight with Kay when she kept calling him fat. This so enraged him that he upended the kitchen table, after which she went to call the police but instead ended up breaking his nose with the telephone and then brandishing a kitchen knife at him. For his part, Jim, nose still bleeding, kept flinging ketchup on Kay from a bottle as he circled her like a matador calling out, “Touché!” After they had released their rage, Kay started crying, and suddenly they embraced in the middle of the kitchen, fell to the floor, and made love. A red light in their marriage had...
PDF Summary Part 2: Discovering Your Personal Frequency
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Pickup Trucks and Red Sports Cars
Matthew caught plenty of greenlights during his senior year of high school. He also experienced a major lesson about learning who you are by learning who you aren’t.
He earned straight A’s while holding down a job that kept him in cash. He excelled at golf, enjoyed parties, and dated both the prettiest girl at his high school and the prettiest girl at the other school across town.
A major part of his identity was his pickup truck. He enjoyed taking girls off-road mudding in it (driving through muddy creek beds). He had a megaphone in the truck’s front grill and delighted in using it to offer commentary on passing girls at school, which in turn delighted them. Everybody loved his truck and him with it.
Then he fell in love with a red 300ZS that he saw on sale at the local Nissan dealership. On the spur of the moment, he traded in his truck for the car and became convinced that girls would dig him all the more because of it. Now his jam at school was to park in the farthest lot (to prevent door dings) and lean against the side of his car, being cool.
But in fact, his new car had the opposite effect. Girls started ignoring him and going...
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Part 3: Becoming Immersed
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By the end of his sophomore year at UT Austin, Matthew found himself writing a lot of short stories. A friend who was studying film at NYU read some of these and suggested that Matthew ought to consider going to film school. To Matthew, the idea sounded foreign and irresponsible. Film school was just too “artsy.”
He changed his mind after he went to the house of some fraternity buddies to study for his psychology final exam, but he felt distracted and instead spent his time reading a book that he found there titled The Greatest Salesman in the World. This book gripped him with its message that the world’s greatest salesman is actually you, the reader, and with its presentation of positive affirmations to recite multiple times per day in order to form good habits and let them rule you. (Shortform note: Read our guide to The Greatest Salesman in the World.)
Reading this book, Matthew suddenly realized that he didn’t want to be a lawyer. He wanted to be a storyteller. In fact, he wanted to go to film school. But first, he had to tell his father, whose intensely practical streak might make him balk at...
PDF Summary Part 4: Made for the Moment
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The plan blew up when he arrived to shoot his single scene and found that he was expected to speak a several-page monologue in Spanish. Things didn’t go well that day, and he learned his lesson. Going forward, he always prepared carefully for his roles.
Instant Star
A few months later, Matthew got an opportunity to act in director Joel Schumacher’s screen adaptation of John Grisham’s novel A Time to Kill. He came better prepared this time, having read not just the script but the novel. He was under consideration for the role of smalltown Ku Klux Klan leader, but he told Schumacher that he really wanted the lead role of the young attorney Jake Brigance, who defends a black man for killing the men who raped his daughter. Schumacher said it was a great idea but a complete nonstarter because Warner Brothers would never give the lead role to a relatively obscure actor.
But then other events converged to boost Matthew’s case. One of these was the unexpected box office success of Sandra Bullock’s previous film While You Were Sleeping. When this happened, she had already been cast as the female lead in A Time to Kill. Now her name served as a powerful draw for the film,...
PDF Summary Part 5: Turning the Page
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He spent the night in jail and got out the next morning when the judge proved sympathetic toward him. She said she found it inconceivable that what should have been a police call for disturbing the peace had resulted in Matthew facing two misdemeanor felony charges after two officers forced their way into his home without warning. She dismissed all charges when Matthew agreed to plead guilty to violating a sound ordinance.
He had to fight off an incipient feeling of gloom for the next several hours, because his outlaw logic told him that getting caught was the worst possible outcome. He hadn’t been raised to go to jail. For consolation, he called his mother, who helped his mood with her outrage at what had been done to him. He received her consolation as a greenlight.
Choosing to make the best of the inevitable, Matthew decided to claim the incident as part of his valid life journey. He framed his ticket for violating the sound ordinance, and his attorney got his criminal record expunged. Then he watched with amusement as “Bongo Naked” tee shirts became the rage in Austin.
But when the local newspaper published a report about the bongoing incident that contained Matthew’s...
PDF Summary Part 6: Learning the Secret of Genius
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Meeting Camila
It was after this greenlight of surrender that the right woman showed up. It happened in 2006 at the Hyde Club on Sunset Boulevard. Matthew saw her across the room as he was making margaritas for his friends. She seemed impossibly attractive to him, like a dream come to life. He offered to make a margarita for her, and she accepted. She said her name was Camila, and they talked all night.
She politely refused when Matthew invited her to his house. But when he walked her to her car, they found it had been towed, so she agreed to go to his house for a single drink with him and his friends. At 3:30 a.m., when Matthew’s chauffeur wasn’t available (because Matthew had made it that way) and calls to three different cab companies yielded no ride (again because of Matthew’s intervention), Camila agreed to spend the night in the guest bedroom.
The next morning, he found her in the kitchen, elegantly holding the floor and enjoying the company of his housekeeper and two of his buddies as if they were all old friends. When he later drove her an hour away to the lot where her car had been towed, they found they enjoyed long stretches of comfortable silence...
PDF Summary Part 7: Defining Your Own Success
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He and Camila discussed the situation together. They prayed about it. She acknowledged that his decision represented a risk, but she also told him that if they were going to make such a dramatic change, they would have to do it wholeheartedly and not “half-ass” it. This direct echo of Jim McConaughey’s words when Matthew had expressed his desire to go to film school seemed striking, even startling. For Matthew, it confirmed the rightness of what they were doing.
Over the next year, dozens of offers to star in romantic comedies continued to come Matthew’s way. And he continued to decline them all, even when the offers started getting higher: $5 million, then $10 million, then $14.5 million. The stress took its toll on him, as he had always felt privileged to be able to make a living doing what he loved, and now he was rejecting well-paying work. As his worries about the future simmered in the background, he focused his thoughts on his desire to forge a new career in which his art and his work more closely resembled his real life and the passions that motivated him.
Another Child
A little over a year into this somewhat worrisome time, on January 3, 2010, Camila gave...
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PDF Summary Part 8: Starting With the End
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He proposed to Camila on Christmas Day 2011. They didn’t set a date, but five months later Camila handed him an invitation to their wedding—just as Kay had done to Jim McConaughey many decades earlier—and told Matthew that she was pregnant with their third child and didn’t want to go through a wedding ceremony with a baby bump. So they planned a three-day weekend wedding and invited 88 of their closest family and friends.
They were married on June 9, 2012, in a large private ceremony at their Texas house. The proceedings involved Brother Christian from the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, pastor Dave Haney, John Mellencamp, and a Candomblé priestess. Afterward, Matthew felt that he now had even more of a real future to live for. His marriage was a greenlight.
Their third child, a son, Livingston Alves McConaughey, was born on December 28, 2012. It was another greenlight. Matthew felt more fulfilled than he ever had before. Whereas ideas had always inspired him before, now he felt inspired by life itself.
A True Detective and a Real Oscar
It was during this period that HBO’s True Detective came along. Matthew loved playing detective Rustin Cohle, whose striking...