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Green lights

Genre: Memoir / Personal Development

Book Type: Audio

Author & Narrator: Matthew McConaughey

Pages / Length: 304 pages / 6 hours and 42 minutes

Publisher: Crown; First Edition (October 20, 2020) / Random House Audio

Book Description:

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.” So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. 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. It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights—and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too. Good luck.


Thoughts:

Ok – anything non-fiction is completely outside my wheelhouse, but I’ve heard great things about this book and decided to give it a try (and I am SO GLAD I DID)!

I did this book on audio, and it made the book absolutely amazing! Hearing a book by the author is one thing; hearing a biography by the author is a whole other level!


Favorite Quotes:

While I loved this whole book, the bits of wisdom sprinkled throughout really resonated with me. Below are my favorite two:


🚦“What is success to you? What is success to me? Continue to ask yourself that question. How are you prosperous? What is your relevance? […] Your answer may change over time and that’s fine, but do yourself this favor, whatever your answer is, don’t choose anything that would jeopardize your soul. Prioritize who you are, who you want to be, and don’t spend time with anything that antagonizes your character.”


🚦“Note to self: We are not here to tolerate our differences, 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, or with equal abilities, but we should have equal opportunity. As individuals, we unite in our values; celebrate that.”


I highly recommend this book and am so glad I stepped out of my comfort zone to read this book.


Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

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