Rating: Excellent
Greenlights blurb excerpt: 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.
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.
My opinion: Loved it!
Lessons from Greenlights:
Don't place perceived limitations where real ones don't exist.“When we mentally give a person, place, or point in time more credit than ourselves, we create a fictitious ceiling. A restriction over the expectations that we have over our own performance in that moment. We get tense. We focus on the outcome instead of the activity and we miss the doing of the deed. We either think the world depends on the result or it's too good to be true. But it doesn't and it isn't. And it's not our right to believe it does or is.
The direction of your life is determined by your choices. “Persist, pivot, or concede. It’s up to us, our choice every time.”. This was brilliantly illustrated by McConaugheys Persist in Australia, Pivot away from Law School, Concede to being the rom-com guy before deciding to pivot towards more challenging roles.
Action over analysis. “Sometimes which choice you make is not as important as making a choice and committing to it.” Experience is the best teacher.
Less impressed, more involved. “The sooner we become less impressed with our life, our accomplishments, our career, our relationships, the prospects in front of us—the sooner we become less impressed and more involved with these things—the sooner we get better at them. We must be more than just happy to be here.”
Simplify, focus, and conserve to liberate. You can do anything in this world, but you can't do everything. When realising he was soon to become a father McConaughey assessed his 5 biggest commitments and eliminated 2 . Creating simplicity, time and the freedom to focus on what mattered most.
Don't half-ass it. When McConaughey called his father from law school to inform him he wanted to pursue a career as an actor, his dad responded with "Don't half-ass it" and he didn't. From that day forward he was all-in.
Create your own Greenlights. "I created a lot of the greenlights by taking responsibility today, which created freedom for me tomorrow." "Decisions today, and sometimes even sacrifices, that teed me up for more pleasure or more of what I wanted tomorrow"
Find your frequency. "We all have the feeling when we're on frequency when our relationships are going well - with our career, our selves, our God. We're in the flow, we're not going too fast, we're in the flow of traffic, in our lane, in our zone. What we give out to the world is what is returned to us. But that doesn't last forever". I would describe his notion of finding your frequency as pursuing your purpose authentically. He describes a scenario in the book where he trades his truck for a red sports car and loses his mojo. It takes a level of self-awareness to understand this and I believe that it is critical to his success.
Preparation relieves pressure. At one point he tried to go into production blind. Having not read the script, he was confronted with the realisation that the first act was a monologue in Spanish. In that moment he learnt that preparation can either make you rigid or empower you. From that day forward he never went in blind again.
To find yourself sometimes you must be alone with yourself. When struggling with self identity and purpose McConaughey often retreated to travel and solitude. Using both help him find his frequency. He has also journalled for most of his life (well ahead of the trend).
Greenlights Best Quotes:
“We all step in shit from time to time. We hit roadblocks, we fuck up, we get fucked, we get sick, we don’t get what we want, we cross thousands of “could have done better”s and “wish that wouldn’t have happened”s in life. Stepping in shit is inevitable, so let’s either see it as good luck or figure out how to do it less often.”
“Don’t walk into a place like you wanna buy it, walk in like you own it.”
“We cannot fully appreciate the light without the shadows. We have to be thrown off balance to find our footing. It’s better to jump than fall."
“We all have scars, we gonna have more. Rather than struggle against time and waste it, let’s dance with time and redeem it. Cause we don’t live longer when we try not to die. We live longer when we are too busy living.”
“I’d rather lose money havin fun than make money being bored,”
“I’ve found that a good plan is to first recognize the problem, then stabilize the situation, organize the response, then respond.”
“A denied expectation hurts more than a denied hope, while a fulfilled hope makes us happier than a fulfilled expectation.”
“I never wrote things down to remember; I always wrote things down so I could forget.”
“Life is our resume. It is our story to tell, and the choices we make write the chapters."
“Catching greenlights is about skill: intent, context, consideration, endurance, anticipation, resilience, speed, and discipline. We can catch more greenlights by simply identifying where the red lights are in our life, and then change course to hit fewer of them.”
“To lose the power of confrontation is to lose the power of unity.”
"We are not here to tolerate our difference, we are here to accept them. We are not here to celebrate our sameness, we are here to salute our distinctions. We are not born into equal circumstances but to equal abilities, but we should have equal opportunities. As individuals, we unite in our values."
“Rather than cover their eyes from ugly truths, I want to cover their eyes from fictional fantasies that will handicap their ability to negotiate tomorrow’s reality.”
“Time alone simplifies the heart.”
"Life. Like architecture. Is a Verb. If designed well. It works. It's beautiful. And it needs no directions. It needs maintenance."
"I am good at what I love, I don't love all that I'm good at"
"There's bullshitters and there's liars. Difference is, the liar tries to hide his bullshit whilst the bullshitter lets you know he's lying. That's why I like bullshitters more than liars."
What Next:
If you are interested in this book, you may want to check out our list of Biographies we have reviewed.
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