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Greenlights – Are you lit? OUT NOW

Greenlights: Your Journal, Your Journey
Out Now

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Greenlights: Your Journal, Your Journey is a guided companion to the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Greenlights, filled with prompts, pithy quotes, adages, outlaw wisdom, and advice on how to live with greater satisfaction.

Matthew has been writing in journals since he was fifteen years old. His adventures have taken him from Texas to Australia, from Mali to Peru—and he has chronicled them all. In this authentic, unconventional journal, the prompts encourage going inside: remembering, reflecting, and musing, and also going outside: adventuring, taking risks, and dreaming big. Who could be a better guide for seekers setting out on the road to understanding their lives inside and out, past, present, and future?

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.

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“It shouldn't surprise you that this book is good, but it will surprise you just how good it is. Wise and entertaining, this is an inspiring memoir and how-to from one of the great outlaw philosophers and artists of our time.”
–Ryan Holiday, author of The Daily Stoic


“Unflinchingly honest and remarkably candid, Matthew McConaughey's book invites us to grapple with the lessons of his life as he did; and to see that the point was never to win, but to understand.”
–Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck



“Matthew McConaughey is a talented actor, a fine writer, but a total genius at living. He attacks life with an exhilarating ferocity. This is a wildly unexpected and delightful book you can’t just read, you have to experience.”
–Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October

Collage of Matthew McConaughey photos throughout his life
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