
Academy Award-winning actor Matthew McConaughey is a married man, a father of three children, and a loyal son and brother. He considers himself a storyteller by occupation, believes it's okay to have a beer on the way to the temple, feels better with a day's sweat on him, and is an aspiring orchestral conductor. In 2009, Matthew and his wife, Camila, founded the just keep livin Foundation, which helps at-risk high school students make healthier mind, body, and spirit choices. In 2019, McConaughey became a professor of practice at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as Minister of Culture/M.O.C. for the University of Texas and the City of Austin. McConaughey is also brand ambassador for Lincoln Motor Company, an owner of the Major League Soccer club Austin FC, and co-creator of his favorite bourbon on the planet, Wild Turkey Longbranch.
From the Academy Award®–winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction. 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.
The debut picture book by Academy Award-winning actor and #1 New York Times bestselling author Matthew McConaugheyJust because I’m in the race,doesn’t mean I’m fully ready.Just because I’m shaking,doesn’t mean that I’m not steady.Have you ever felt worried and excited at the same time?Have you ever had your feelings hurt but forgiven someone anyway?Have you ever thought there was more than one right answer to a question?That’s because contradictions are all around us. And they make us who we are.Filled with his trademark humor and wisdom, Academy Award–winning actor and #1 New York Times bestselling author Matthew McConaughey has crafted a soulful and irreverent collection of life lessons that empowers readers, big and small, to celebrate how we are all full of possibility.Why? Just because.
From the Academy Award–winning actor and author of Greenlights comes an inspiring, faith-filled, and often hilarious collection of personal poetry and prayers about navigating the rodeo of life and chasing down the original dream, belief.My prayers are my poems are my prayers.I’ve always relied on logic to make sense of myself and the world.A prescriptionist at heart, I’ve always looked to reason to find the rhyme, the practical to get to the mystical, the choreography to find the dance, the proof to get to the truth, and reality to get to the dream.I’ve been finding that tougher to do lately. It’s more than hard to know what to believe in; it’s hard to believe.But I don’t want to quit believing, and I don’t want to stop believing in . . . humanity, you, myself, our potential.I think it’s time for us to flip the script on what’s historically been our means of making sense, and instead open our aperture to enchantment and look to faith, belief, and dreams for our reality.Let’s sing more than we might make sense, believe in more than the world can conclude, get more impressed with the wow instead of the how, let inspiration interrupt our appointments, dream our way to reality, serve some soul food to our hungry heads, put proof on the shelf for a season, and rhyme our way to reason.Forget logic, certainty, owning, or making a start-up company of it; let’s go beyond what we can merely imagine, and believe, in the poetry of life.
by Matthew McConaughey
Rating: 4.7 ⭐