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.
Matthew believes the positive aspects of a person’s life can be explained by the concept of “greenlights.” These are events that let you know your life is on the right track. A greenlight could take many different forms, such as success, prosperity, meeting the love of your life, or witnessing the birth of your child. Or it could be a simple sense of rightness and well-being. You can “catch” greenlights through luck or earn them through smart living.
Life also has yellow and red lights—detours, illnesses, failures. You have three choices when you come up against yellow or red lights: Persist, pivot for a different approach, or surrender. Just remember that reds and yellows, like greenlights, lead you to your destiny. The art of living is to understand how and when to select wisely from among the three different responses whenever you receive a red or yellow light.
Matthew grew up in a family ruled by a combination of strong values and “outlaw logic”—an inheritance from their ancestors, a group that included cattle thieves, riverboat gamblers, and a bodyguard for Al Capone. He spent his first 10 years in Uvalde, Texas, with his parents, Jim and Kay, and his older brothers, Mike and Pat. Jim worked in the oil industry and had a big personality. Kay was tough and opinionated, with an inclination to deny unpleasant realities. Their marriage was tumultuous and sometimes violent. They divorced and remarried twice.
They raised their boys to appreciate the power of language. For example, Matthew once received a “whupping” for saying “I can’t.” Jim and Kay taught their boys never to use hateful words, never to claim to be helpless, and never to lie. Matthew later recognized this childhood training as an early greenlight.
He credits his mother’s power of denial with helping to form his actor’s sensibility. For example, she once had him enter a plagiarized poem, written by a professional poet, in a school contest, telling him that since he found the poem meaningful, in a way it really did belong to him. He won the contest.
When Matthew was around 10, he built an enormous treehouse that proved to be a greenlight because it gave him a sense of peace and rightness during a dislocated time. This happened when his family moved to Longview, where Matthew spent the summer building the treehouse in a huge white pine, using stolen lumber. He kept the project secret and worked 12-hour days to complete it. The final result was 13 stories high. He spent the rest of the summer sitting on the top floor and daydreaming as he gazed out over the forest. He has always remembered that summer as the best of his life.
Jim McConaughey valued rites of passage to manhood, and he saw that each of his boys received one. Matthew’s happened during his senior year of high school when he came home one night and lied to Jim about having stolen a pizza from Pizza Hut. He knew that he only needed to admit the truth, which would earn him some yelling and maybe a few lashes from a belt, but nothing more. In fact, it would earn him respect. But he maintained the lie, and Jim backhanded him across the face for it. Matthew panicked, cried, and wet his pants as Jim continued to rage at him. He had failed the test.
He got a second chance—and passed—a year later when he defended his father from a pool hall bouncer who accused him of not paying his bill. Matthew flew into a rage and beat the bouncer senseless. That night, Jim called all of his buddies and proudly told them that Matthew was going to be alright. The youngest son had proved himself and become one of the men. This passage to manhood was a greenlight.
After graduating from high school, the major theme in Matthew’s life became that of finding his identity. He encountered a life-transforming greenlight when he spent a year in Australia as an exchange student. His experiences there led him to the idea of finding his own frequency—of being true to himself.
In Australia, he stayed with a host family, the Dooleys, who proved to be pointedly eccentric. Matthew’s most innocent actions, such as praising cheeseburgers or expressing pride in an American athlete, earned him stern lectures from the father, Norvel, about the superiority of English culture and the wrongness of Matthew’s audacity in sharing his opinions. At one point, Norvel announced that he and Marjorie had decided that Matthew should call them Mum and Pop. Matthew refused, saying that he already had parents. Living in such a strange and unfamiliar environment forced Matthew to find his frequency.
Matthew caught more greenlights when he attended the University of Texas at Austin and decided to enter the film school. When he hesitantly ran this “artsy” idea past Jim, his father just told him not to “half-ass it”—the best validation Matthew could have received, and a significant greenlight. Other greenlights included his decision to remain true to his own taste in movies when his film school classmates scorned the Hollywood blockbusters that he enjoyed, and a dean’s agreement to give Matthew all C’s if he would just show up for exams, so that he could get real-world film and video experience with local talent and ad agencies.
Matthew’s breakthrough into the world of feature films came in college when he landed the part of Wooderson in Dazed and Confused, which was shot in Austin. He developed his now-iconic line “alright, alright, alright” spontaneously when director Richard Linklater decided to shoot an unscripted scene. That line became a defining moment and a greenlight for his career.
Five days in shooting his scenes, Matthew learned that his father had died. As he grappled with this inevitability, he was filled with a sense of adult responsibility and a desire to live up to his potential by being more purposeful. He felt it was time to become less impressed with his own life and accomplishments and become more deeply involved with all of them.
After graduating, Matthew drove 24 hours to Hollywood and crashed at the house of producer Don Phillips, who had gotten him the role of Wooderson. When he pressed Don for a meeting with an agent because he needed the money, Don warned that Hollywood would chew up and spit out needy people, and he recommended that Matthew leave for a while to get some perspective. Matthew put Don’s advice into action by taking a motorcycle tour of Europe with two friends from Dazed and Confused. Afterward, he flew back to America with a head cleared of the neediness that Phillips had warned him about. The trip was a greenlight.
Back in Hollywood, Matthew quickly picked up movie roles, earning good money and enjoying these greenlights. It wasn’t all greenlights, though. For one indie film where he had received a small role, he decided not to read the script before showing up, to ensure that his performance was spontaneous. When he got there, he found that he was expected to speak several pages of dialogue in Spanish. He realized that you have to balance spontaneity with preparation.
A few months later, the opportunity arose for him to act in the movie adaptation of John Grisham’s novel A Time to Kill. Under consideration for a small supporting role, he told the director, Joel Schumacher, that he wanted to play the lead. Schumacher said Warner Brothers would never hire a relatively unknown actor for this. But then a twist of fate ended up giving Matthew the role, and it shot him to instant stardom—a career-defining greenlight.
In the wake of A Time to Kill, Matthew’s new freedom to pick any project induced a kind of decision paralysis. Feeling unbalanced, he wanted to go someplace to recenter himself, someplace where he wasn’t famous. So he spent a few days at New Mexico’s Monastery of Christ in the Desert, which helped him clear his head. Then he had a non-sexual wet dream that served as a greenlight: He found himself floating peacefully down the Amazon, wrapped in snakes, surrounded by crocodiles, piranhas, and sharks, while incongruous African tribesmen watched from the riverbanks. Upon waking, he recognized the dream as something significant, and he embarked on a 22-day trek through Peru.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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 approach to recognizing and even creating those moments when life says “yes” and you cruise into success as you pursue your destiny.
As you head into Matthew’s story, you’ll better understand his thought process and personal lingo if you first understand his signature concepts of inevitability, relativity, and greenlights.
“Inevitability” refers to inescapable facts: the non-negotiable realities that life hands you, such as your parents, place of birth, and events beyond your choice.
“Relativity” refers to a person's choices in response to the inevitable facts in their life. Freedom comes from your ability to “get relative with the inevitable” (one of Matthew’s favorite ways of phrasing it) by choosing your responses and attitudes to inevitable things. In Matthew’s thinking, all of life is an interaction between the inevitable and the relative. The choices you make in response to the inevitable add up to the story of your life. These philosophies guided Matthew when he wrote this book. It presents the story of his first five decades.
The book’s other guiding concept is the idea of “greenlights.” These look and feel like health, prosperity, and success. Or a greenlight could be a sense of rightness, inspiration, or well being. When you receive a greenlight—you get the job, you receive the insight, you meet the person of your dreams—it’s a sign that your life is on the right path.
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:
Greenlights are connected to inevitability and relativity. The art of living is to understand how and when to either persist, pivot, or surrender whenever you receive an inevitable red light. Matthew sees his lifelong practice of using intuition and intelligence to deal with the inevitable as the very key to his success.
The parts that follow take you from Matthew’s early years growing up in rural Texas to his experiences as an exchange student in Australia, a film school student at the University of Texas, a green young actor in Dazed in Confused, a rising star in Hollywood, a traveler in Europe, a pilgrim to Peru, a seeker in Mali, and a family man who returned to Texas, The book traces the three intertwined topics of his movie career, his quest to become his real self, and his lifelong search for love and fatherhood.
Each part of this summary covers a different era in Matthew’s life, and each begins with a distillation of the lessons he learned during that period. Each part’s biographical account then illustrates those lessons in various ways.
Matthew McConaughey’s family line includes cattle thieves, riverboat gamblers, and a bodyguard for Al Capone. He says the McConaughey mode of seeing and being in the world follows a kind of “outlaw logic.”
In relating the story of his boyhood in rural Texas, Matthew draws a number of lessons from his most formative experiences. Chief among these are the following:
Jim McConaughey, Matthew’s father, came from Patterson, Mississippi, and grew up in Louisiana. His three sons—Mike, Pat, and Matthew—saw him as a bastion of common sense and wanted to emulate his work ethic, traditional manners (sir, ma’am), and loyalty. Jim loved drinking beer, telling stories, and hosting parties. He valued hard work over flashy appearances. He had a big, commanding personality and a soft spot for underdogs, and dreamed of “making it big” and “striking it rich”—he’d been an athlete who was briefly drafted to the NFL with the Green Bay Packers. Professionally, he worked in the oil industry.
Kay McConaughey, Matthew’s mother, came from Altoona, Pennsylvania, but always claimed she was from Trenton, New Jersey, on the grounds that nobody would want to be from someplace called “Altoona.” She was tough, aggressive, and opinionated, and she never carried any stress because she always forgave herself immediately. She had a difficult upbringing, and Matthew says this gave her a powerful drive to make up her own reality and deny anything she didn’t like (as in her claim that she was from Trenton). According to Matthew, this power of denial was one of Kay’s strengths. For example, it apparently helped her defeat two different kinds of cancer without receiving professional medical treatment.
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 turned green. It was a cycle of fighting and reuniting that Matthew and his brothers knew well. Today, Matthew says this tumultuous way of being together, which might seem shocking to other people, was simply the way his parents loved each other.
Matthew was born in 1969 in Uvalde, Texas, where he spent his first ten years. He was an “accident.” For the first five months she carried him, Kay thought he was a tumor.
He had two older brothers, Mike and Pat. Mike bore the nickname “Rooster” because he always woke up at the crack of dawn. Pat came into the family by adoption when Mike said he wanted a little brother for his tenth birthday.
Jim and Kay taught their three sons to believe in God, passing along a reverence for both Old Testament sternness and New Testament mercy. They didn’t hesitate to use physical discipline on their boys when they thought it necessary. And while they did mete out “whuppings” for such mundane infractions as cursing, the three McConaughey boys knew they were only really in trouble whenever they said or did something that, in their parents’ opinion, would ultimately hurt them (the sons) by diminishing them or distorting their identities. For example, Matthew received his first such punishment in kindergarten when he responded to being called “Matt” on the playground. As Kay punished him, she told him that he wasn’t named after a doormat. Another time, he was punished for saying the words “I can’t.”
The attention to language was especially impactful. Jim and Kay raised their sons to be careful of what they said because words embody values. They taught their boys never to use hateful words, never to claim to be helpless, and never to lie. Matthew later recognized this training as a very early greenlight in his life.
With her tendency to “fudge” reality, Kay inadvertently helped to forge the sensibility in Matthew that would make him a good actor. For example, In 1977, Kay entered Matthew in a contest called “Little Mr. Texas.” He came away with a trophy, and his mother hung a framed photo of him with it on the kitchen wall. From then on, she referred to him as Little Mr. Texas. Decades later, he looked again at the photo and saw that the trophy’s nameplate actually said “runner-up.” When he called his mother to ask about it, she told him that he had been the real Little Mr. Texas because the nominal winner came from a rich family that “cheated” by buying their son a fancy suit for the contest.
When Matthew was in seventh grade and trying to write a poem for a school contest, Kay had him read a poem by Ann Ashford and then told him to submit it to the contest as his own. When he questioned her on this, she said that since he understood the poem and liked it, in a way it really did belong to him. She also said that if he won the contest with it, the worst the school could do if they found out was to take back the medal. So he entered Ashford’s poem as his own. And he did win the contest.
When Matthew was around 10, he experienced a change that taught him the importance of finding freedom by building your own structure. The lesson was literal: It involved the building of an enormous treehouse.
Jim and Kay had moved the family from Uvalde to Longview. Mike was already grown up and living on his own. Pat was away at golf camp. Kay was enjoying an extended “vacation” in Florida. (Matthew didn’t know at the time that she and Jim were actually going through their second divorce.) This meant Matthew and Jim spent several months by themselves in Longview, living in a double-wide trailer.
In a new town with an empty summer ahead of him, Matthew made a project of building a treehouse in a huge white pine. It was a major project involving a month of stealing boards, plywood planks, and nails from a local lumberyard at night and transporting them to the site. Then he spent six weeks building the treehouse, working 12-hour days and making the structure ever higher, until it was a full 13 stories tall, reaching up to the top of that towering pine. When he was finished, he spent the rest of the summer sitting on the top floor, eating bag lunches and daydreaming as he gazed out over the panorama of the forest beneath him. Today, he remembers that summer as the best one of his life. The treehouse and everything that went with it was a greenlight. He had built a haven for himself that served as a source of peace in a new environment.
Jim McConaughey valued rites of passage, and he saw that each of his boys received one. For example, when Mike was 22, Jim picked a physical fight and wouldn’t stop coming at him until Mike finally knocked him out with a 2 x 4. When Jim regained consciousness, he expressed heartfelt pride for his son and viewed him as an equal from then on.
Matthew’s first chance at a rite of passage arrived during his senior year of high school, and it didn’t end well. One night he came home at midnight, having skipped out on the bill with a friend at the local Pizza Hut, and found Jim waiting up. Jim had spoken by phone with the father of Matthew’s friend, and now he confronted Matthew and demanded to know if it was true that he had stolen a pizza. Shocked and flustered, Matthew denied it.
He knew his father just wanted him to own up to it. In McConaughey family logic, the one thing worse than getting caught in some bit of misbehavior was lying about it. Jim himself had stolen a pizza or two in his lifetime, and Matthew knew that he only needed to admit the truth to his father, which would earn him some yelling and maybe a few lashes from a belt, but nothing more. In fact, it would earn him respect.
But instead of coming clean, for reasons he couldn’t fathom within himself, he doubled down on the lie. The result was predictable. Jim sprang at him and backhanded him across the face, knocking him down. Matthew panicked, cried, wet his pants, and crawled into a corner as Jim continued to rage at him.
Ever since that night, he has regretted his failure to fulfill his passage to manhood that night. He had always been more his mother’s son than his father’s, and that night was his first chance to become Jim’s son as well, to become a man. But he failed the test.
Fortunately, Matthew’s chance came around again a year after he graduated from high school. He and his father stopped for a drink at a pool hall, and as they were leaving, the bouncer asked Jim if he had paid his bill. He put his hand on Jim’s chest to stop him, and Matthew, seeing another man put a hand on his father, exploded in fury. He leaped on the bouncer and beat him savagely. He was so enraged that Jim finally had to pull him off the man.
That night, Jim called all of his buddies and proudly announced what had happened. He told them they didn’t have to worry about Matthew anymore because Matthew was going to be alright. The youngest son had proved himself. From that night on, Matthew was no longer a child but one of the men. This passage to manhood was a greenlight.
In Part 1, Matthew describes some of the life experiences that taught him to honor structure if you want to be free. This exercise leads you to reflect on your own inherited structures and the ways you can honor them.
What are some of the “structures” you inherited from your childhood, whether values, habits of mind, or codes of conduct? How did your upbringing teach you to think, talk, and live?
How has your life reflected the influence of these structures?
How can you best honor your inherited structures to find more freedom? (What traditions could you keep? What values or habits could you maintain?) On the flipside, how would refusing to honor these impair your freedom? (What inner or outer conflicts or confusions might you encounter by totally abandoning your past?)
Having grown up learning the outlaw logic of Jim and Kay McConaughey, and having failed his father’s rite of passage, Matthew still needed to find his personal center of gravity and work out his independent identity. Events during and after his senior year of high school facilitated this transition when life itself, acting in concert with Matthew’s free choices in the face of his life’s inevitabilities, put him on the road to self-discovery. It was a road that led to a red sports car that stole his macho mojo, a year’s stay in Australia with a family so weird they seemed right out of the Twilight Zone, and a second chance to establish his manhood in his father’s eyes.
Through his life experiences during this time, Matthew learned the following:
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 mudding with other guys. It wasn’t long before he had learned his lesson. He traded the car back in for his truck, and in regaining his truck, he regained his mojo. He had briefly gotten too caught up in looking cool instead of being real, and he had paid the price.
After graduating from high school, Matthew encountered a series of red and yellow lights that served as the raw material for one of his most life-transforming greenlights because they led him to the idea of finding your own frequency and taught him how to be true to himself.
Kay suggested he become an exchange student, and he signed up through the local Rotary Club to spend a year in Australia. When the club members told Matthew that many young people came home early from such trips because of homesickness, he solemnly swore that he would fulfill the whole year.
A few weeks later, he received a letter from his Australian host family expressing their excitement and telling him that they lived in a paradise on the outskirts of Sydney near the beach. He was thrilled, anticipating a total blast during his year Down Under.
What he actually encountered in the Dooleys’ house was a family whose eccentricity was so pronounced that it drove him into a personal crisis of identity.
The Dooleys—Norvel, Marjorie, and their son Michael—met Matthew at the airport in Sydney. Norvel was short, stout, balding, and mustached, and he used an affected English accent. Marjorie, the mother, was even shorter, and she used a walker because of spinal kyphosis (a “hunchback”). Michael, their son, wore a tucked-in shirt with a pocket-protector and carried an enormous ring full of unnecessary keys. They all embraced Matthew and enthusiastically welcomed him to Australia. (Their other son, Rhys, lived with Matthew’s parents in America while Matthew was in Australia.)
Norvel told Matthew that he and his family lived outside Sydney in a town called Gosford with beautiful beaches. But when they got to Gosford, Norvel drove right through, saying they actually lived in the next town. He went on to do the same thing twice more, driving through two more towns, each smaller than the last. When they finally arrived at the Dooleys’ real home of Warnervale, Matthew was dismayed to see a population sign that said 305. There was hardly a town at all. Warnervale was just a scattered collection of houses in the middle of nowhere.
That weekend, Norvel and Marjorie asked Matthew to choose a classic American meal to cook for some extended family who were coming to visit. He decided on hamburgers, then changed it to cheeseburgers, announcing that whereas the man who had invented hamburgers was smart, the man who had invented cheeseburgers was a genius.
Hearing this, Norvel took Matthew to his study, shut the door behind them, and proceeded to lecture him sternly on the supposed vice of voicing his personal opinions “for the masses.” Norvel told Matthew that during his stay at their house, he would learn about the virtues of fine wines and cheeses and the wrongness of sharing his opinions.
Confused, but wanting to make the best of things, Matthew mentally attributed the strange episode to “cultural differences.”
As weeks and months went by, the “cultural differences” assumptions became impossible to maintain. The Dooleys were simply crazy. Once when Matthew was sitting at the dinner table and watching the Summer Olympics on the television in the next room, he audibly expressed his pride when an American won the Women’s 4 x 100 meter relay. This led to another lecture from Norvel in his study, with Norvel preaching to Matthew that Great Britain’s David Broome, who won the bronze medal in 1960 for equestrian show jumping, was a really great athlete.
Another time, Matthew declined some mint jelly when it was passed around with lamb. In response, Norvel leapt to his feet and announced that Matthew, an immature American, would learn that mint jelly always goes with lamb.
By three months into Matthew’s stay, every day with the Dooleys had come to seem like an off-kilter nightmare. In his strange and unsettled situation, he felt the need to maintain his sanity by following some kind of discipline and purpose—even a made-up one—that would maintain his moral center. So out of the blue, he decided to become a vegetarian.
Not knowing how vegetarians actually eat, he began to consume a regular dinner consisting of an entire head of iceberg lettuce topped with ketchup. He also started running six miles every day. He swore off alcohol. He decided to become a monk. He began writing multi-page letters to his parents, his friends, and his old girlfriends back in America.
After five months, Matthew had lost weight, dropping to 140 pounds. Each night after dinner, he took a bath, listened to music, wrote a letter to someone back home, and masturbated while reading Lord Byron. He felt his sanity hung on this self-made routine.
Once, when the extended Dooley family was there for another visit, Marjorie called Matthew into the living room with everyone present and commanded Matthew to kiss Meredith, their son Michael’s girlfriend, on the lips. Matthew was shocked, and he saw that Meredith was equally mortified, while across the room, Michael was acting agitated and unhappy. Matthew declined the command, but Marjorie insisted. Marshaling his courage, Matthew flatly refused, sharply telling Marjorie never to do that again to him, Meredith, or Michael.
The last straw for Matthew came one night at dinner when Norvel announced that he and Marjorie had decided that for the rest of his stay, Matthew would call them Mum and Pop. Stunned, Matthew thanked Norvel but refused, saying he already had parents.
The next morning, he awoke to the sound of Marjorie weeping hysterically because Matthew wouldn’t call her Mum. He ran to comfort her, and then they both cried—him because of the absolute craziness of the situation. Despite his discomfort, the experience of refusing to do something that he knew was absolutely wrong for him solidified his growing inner sense of a new self-determination.
Realizing that he needed to create a boundary between himself and the Dooleys because their words and actions just didn’t sit right with him, Matthew told the local Rotary Club president that he wanted to experience living with a different Australian family. The president located a new family and set a schedule for this transition. But on the evening when he was scheduled to move out, Norvel confronted Matthew and said that he and Marjorie had decided Matthew wouldn’t be leaving after all, but would instead remain living with them, so he should unpack his bags. Matthew flew into a rage and punched all the way through the plywood bedroom door, screaming a profanity-laced threat at Norvel to get out of his way or incur a serious beating. Norvel blanched and fled.
The rest of Matthew’s time in Australia was much more positive. He changed host families two more times after that, having good experiences with all of them.
On his last night, these families gathered to say farewell. Amid the dinner and drinks, one of them asked Matthew how he had managed to endure living with the Dooleys for so long. When everybody broke out in laughter, an astonished Matthew realized that they had known all along that the Dooleys were crazy. Placing him with them had been a big prank. He called his new friends motherfuckers and then joined in their laughter.
As a high school senior and then an exchange student, Matthew found that you can discover your frequency (learn who you are) by learning who you aren’t and getting rid of things that aren’t right for you. This exercise helps you to begin the process of sorting these things out in your own life.
Recount a situation where you were asked or pressured to do something that you knew was wrong for you.
How did you respond? If you gave in, how did that make you feel? If you successfully resisted, how did that make you feel?
If you weren't happy with your response to the situation, what lessons did you learn that you can apply to a similar situation in the future? If you were happy with your response, why?
How did your response reflect your sense of identity?
Having begun to learn who he was by discovering who he wasn’t, and having at last passed the threshold to manhood, Matthew was now ready to head into the world of college and career. In this stage of his life, he went to film school at the University of Texas at Austin, gained his first real film role as Wooderson in Dazed and Confused, suffered the loss of his father, moved to Hollywood, and took a motorcycle tour of Europe. The insights and lessons he gained from all of these experiences include the following:
Since eighth grade, Matthew had planned on attending law school and becoming a defense attorney. He applied to multiple universities and was accepted to three of them. He wanted to attend Southern Methodist University, but instead chose the University of Texas at Austin when his brother Pat told him that the McConaughey family finances were suffering because the oil business was in a slump, and a degree from UT Austin was significantly cheaper than one from SMU. Matthew never told his father that he had switched his choice to help the family.
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 such an idea.
Matthew strategically timed his phone call for 7:30 p.m., when Jim would be relaxing after dinner with a drink. When he broke the news, Jim asked if he really, deeply wanted to go to film school. Matthew said yes. In response, Jim simply told him not to “half-ass it.” This was the best validation Matthew could have received. Jim’s approval of Matthew’s decision to attend film school was a significant greenlight.
Matthew’s GPA of 3.82 got him into the honors program in UT Austin’s film school. He was the only fraternity guy in the program; the other students were all goths and artsy types. He liked blockbuster movies like Die Hard, his classmates called these shit and recommended art films. He eventually realized that they never actually watched the movies they trashed. Their condemnations arose from ignorant prejudice. This led him to flatly reject their habit of condemning something just because it’s popular. It was a miniature defining moment for him when he claimed ownership of his film preferences.
Meanwhile, to get some real-world experience he signed with a local talent agency and interned at an ad agency. He got a pager and began leaving or skipping classes frequently to audition in Dallas and San Antonio for television commercials and beer ads. He received work as a hand model. He appeared in one of Trisha Yearwood’s music videos. He worked both behind and in front of the camera in short film productions.
When a dean threatened to fail him because of his frequent absences, Matthew told the man that real-world experiences were more valuable than college classes, and he asked if he could receive all C’s if he promised to show up for every exam. So that’s what happened. This was another greenlight.
Matthew’s breakthrough into the world of feature films occurred when met producer Don Phillips at the Hyatt bar in Austin. Phillips was in town to work on a movie, and when Matthew introduced himself, they hit it off. Before the night was over, Phillips had offered Matthew a small part in the movie he was casting. Its title was Dazed and Confused.
When Matthew read the screenplay, he loved the line spoken by the character of Wooderson, a twenty-something stoner who hangs out with teens, about loving high school girls because they stay the same while he gets older. Today, Matthew refers to lines like that—lines in a script that generate pure delight and make him want to be involved in a movie—as “launchpad lines.”
When Matthew developed his performance as Wooderson, he looked to his brother Pat for the basic inspiration, since he had worshiped Pat since childhood and found him cooler than James Dean. Matthew’s first scene as Wooderson, and thus the first scene that he ever shot for any feature film, came about spontaneously when the director, Richard Linklater, talked to him about the kinds of things that a character like Wooderson would love the most. Then, on the spur of the moment, Linklater decided to shoot an unscripted scene where Wooderson tries to pick up a nerdy intellectual girl. He told Matthew just to improvise.
Matthew prepared by reflecting deeply on who Wooderson was and what he loved. He decided that Wooderson loved four things: his car, getting high, rock and roll, and chicks. He had already had three of these on hand. The fourth was represented by the girl he was trying to get. So when Linklater said “Action!”, Matthew-as-Wooderson drove up, thought about those three achieved desires, and said, “Alright, alright, alright.” That improvised line became an iconic moment in his career, proving to be a life-defining greenlight and following him forever afterward.
Five days into shooting his scenes in Dazed and Confused, Matthew received a call from his mother to inform him that his father had died. Jim had suffered a heart attack after making love to Kay. Matthew left Austin and drove back to Houston for an Irish wake.
As he grappled with the inevitability of this loss, he began to realize that this was his most important rite of passage to manhood. The impact of Jim’s death filled him with a sense of adult responsibility and increased involvement in his own life. Formerly, he had always been playing at life to some extent, like a child. Now it was time to really live it as a man, to be less impressed with himself and more involved in his future.
Four days after Jim’s wake, Matthew returned to finish his work on Dazed and Confused. When he got there, Linklater gave him some dialogue in a scene where Wooderson wasn’t originally supposed to speak. Wooderson’s advice to another character in that scene to just “keep livin.” was Matthew’s own creation. He based it on what he told Linklater before shooting: that he felt he could keep Jim McConaughey’s spirit alive forever by living as Jim had taught his sons to do.
After graduating, Matthew earned $4,000 in Austin for playing the lead villain in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. Then he drove 24 hours to Hollywood with a loaded U-Haul, having arranged to stay at producer Don Phillips’s house for a while. When he arrived, Phillips refused at first to let him in, telling Matthew through the closed door that he would see him later. Matthew kept insisting, and finally Phillips opened the door naked with an erection and said to please give him 20 minutes.
While Matthew was living with Don, he lost a planned job as a production assistant on the Coen Brothers film The Hudsucker Proxy. When Matthew asked Phillips to get him a meeting with an agent because he really needed money, Phillips told him that with that kind of attitude, he ought to leave Hollywood for a while because the movie business would chew up and spit out a needy person.
Matthew decided to put Don’s advice in action. In short order, he left town and flew to Europe with two friends from Dazed and Confused, Cole Hauser and Rory Cochrane. After convincing a motorcycle shop owner named Johan In Rosenheim, Germany, to rent them three bikes for a month for just $1,200 (all they could afford), they rode through Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, taking a grand tour and enjoying life. Afterward, Matthew headed back to America with new friends, new stories to tell, and a head newly cleared of the neediness that Don Phillips had warned him about. The trip was a greenlight.
The loss of Matthew’s father made him realize that he needed to lose his childhood view of being “impressed” by life and assume the adult responsibility of being more involved with it. This exercise will help you explore this principle in your own experience.
What are some of the iconic presences in your life, the figures of “mythic” stature? Your parents? Your religion? Your job?
Consider the impact of losing one of these things. How would such a loss affect your thoughts, emotions, and worldview? (If you’ve actually experienced such a loss, how did it affect you?)
What gift might lie on the other side of such a loss for you? How might this lead to your becoming a more fully functional adult? Greater freedom? A new sense of worthy obligations to fulfill?
Matthew had graduated from film school. He had acted in two feature films. He had moved to Hollywood. Now he was ready to begin his career in earnest. In this part, we’ll look at his early years in Hollywood, when he found rapid success followed quickly by full superstardom. He struggled to handle his newfound celebrity, and the quest to maintain his personal center of gravity led him to New Mexico, Peru, the Amazon, and finally, to America’s backroads.
Insights and lessons from this period of his life include the following:
When Matthew returned to Hollywood from Europe, he immediately received well-paying roles in two high-profile movies, Boys on the Side and Angels in the Outfield. He was off to a promising start, but his early career wasn’t without a few wobbles. He learned the hard way that you have to balance spontaneous freedom with careful preparation.
He began taking acting lessons, but he soon discovered that his newly self-aware approach to the craft was getting in his way at auditions, and he stopped getting roles. When he finally landed a part in an indie film, Scorpion Spring, he thought he might improve his performance by returning to his instinctive acting skills, so he decided to take a different tack by not reading the script ahead of time. Instead of preparing, he spent some time mentally forming the drug runner character, and then he planned to give his performance in spontaneous freedom.
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.
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, thus enabling Warner Brothers to consider a less bankable actor for the male lead.
Around the same time, a man and woman who said they had been inspired by the mass murderers Mickey and Mallory in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers murdered a friend of Grisham’s. Woody Harrelson had played Mickey. Presently he was under consideration for the role of Jake Brigance in A Time to Kill. After the murder, Grisham, who had casting control over that part, gave a hard “no” to Harrelson’s inclusion. Shortly afterward, Schumacher called Matthew to come in for a private audition.
At the audition, Matthew first performed the scene as written, doing a passable but not especially noteworthy job. Then Schumacher told him to do it again, but without the script, just speaking from his heart. Matthew prepared mentally and emotionally by thinking about the horror of the crime against the young girl in the movie and contrasting this with his own lifelong desire to be a father. Then he performed the scene from that inner state. Two weeks later, Schumacher called and offered him the role—a career-defining greenlight.
Immediately after the opening weekend of A Time to Kill, Matthew was a newly minted celebrity who couldn’t go out in public like normal people anymore. The show-business press lauded him as “the next big thing.” Strangers began to approach him like old friends. He immediately began to receive his choice of whatever scripts he wanted.
During this heady period, he enjoyed the fame and money. But soon it all began to feel out of balance. Life itself began to seem unreal. He began to sense an increasing need to regain his sense of spiritual grounding. This need eventually led him to a desert monastery in New Mexico.
Having heard that Thomas Merton, the renowned Trappist monk and writer, had described the Monastery of Christ in the Desert as a good place to have one’s perspectives realigned, Matthew drove from Hollywood to New Mexico and sought permission to stay at the monastery. The monks there welcomed him and gave him a room with a cot and sleeping mat.
The next day he spoke for several hours to one of the monks, a man named Brother Christian. During a long desert walk, Matthew aired his feelings of anguish and guilt over his sense of losing himself in perverse, low, and arrogant thoughts due to his new fame. He said he felt lost. Brother Christian simply looked at Matthew and said, “Me, too.” Matthew recognized this as a greenlight. He felt deeply affirmed, realizing that sometimes it’s not advice we need but confirmation that someone else shares our feelings.
In the wake of A Time to Kill, Matthew’s new freedom to pick any project he wanted induced a kind of decision paralysis. To find direction and move forward creatively, he felt that he needed to go someplace where he could get in touch with his creative center again—someplace where his fame wouldn’t distort the way people perceived him and reacted to him.
Right around then, he had a non-sexual wet dream that served as a greenlight. In the dream, he was floating down the Amazon river, wrapped in snakes, surrounded by crocodiles and piranhas and sharks, while some incongruous African tribesmen—incongruous because the Amazon isn’t in Africa—watched him from the riverbanks. Strangely, he felt peaceful instead of horrified. He had an orgasm, and then he woke up.
Recognizing the dream as something significant, and feeling a strong desire to chase down its meaning, he embarked on a 22-day trip to Peru. His journey involved hiking through the Andes and traveling by bus, boat, and plane to the city of Iquitos, which is inaccessible by car. On the twelfth night of his journey, alone in his tent in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest, he took off his clothing and jewelry, all the symbols of his existing life, and tried to understand who he really was at his root, stripped of all outward identity markers. He began punching himself in the face. He vomited.
The next morning, he woke feeling strangely energized and refreshed. While taking an aimless walk through the forest, he came across a surreally beautiful kaleidoscope of butterflies, thousands of them, pulsing in formation on the jungle floor. Then he noticed the Amazon River just past them—the destination from his dream.
That day, he floated naked in the Amazon on his back, just like he had in his dream (except without the snakes and things). When he arrived back at the camp, his guide said to him in Spanish, “You are light.” Matthew felt forgiven, cleansed, and entirely present, and this feeling remained with him through two more weeks of hiking and canoeing. Once, he thought he saw a mermaid’s tail wave at him from the Amazon.
He felt that he had discovered an important truth, or maybe that a truth had found him because he had put himself in the right place. His Amazon experience and its accompanying epiphany, a transmission of wordless significance, were a greenlight that ushered him on to the next phase of his life by helping him reconnect with himself.
After chasing his Amazon dream, Matthew returned to Hollywood, where he took the role of spiritual writer Palmer Joss in the film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. He felt a strong connection with the character’s insistence on the reality of spirit in the midst of a culture of science.
After this, he began to feel the need to travel again, not to Peru but around the United States. He bought a GMC van and radically customized it, adding, among other features, a mounted microphone and cassette recorder so that he could record himself talking and musing while he drove. Many of the musings he recorded with it went into this book. He named the van “Cosmo” and took off to travel the US highways.
Several months later, he bought an Airstream RV to pull behind the van, becoming an official full-timer in the world of RV living. He drove everywhere, from east to west coast and across the northern and southern borders, following his own schedule, going where he wanted, attending sporting events, concerts, and more.
He also continued with his movie career, taking meetings with directors while on the road. During this time, he appeared in his old friend Richard Linklater’s The Newton Boys. He felt a deep sense of identity with his character in that one, the real-life bank robber Willis Newton, who was one of the progenitors of outlaw logic, and who hailed from Matthew’s hometown of Uvalde, Texas.
Matthew enjoyed making these movies, but he exulted in the life of trailer parks, which he found were home to a wonderful variety of human types. To his pleasure, he discovered that people in such parks lived by an etiquette code that valued privacy, and even though they often knew who he was, they mostly left him alone.
While shooting a movie in Canada, Matthew lived in the trailer park on the Squamish Nation Indian Reserve in Vancouver, where he ended up becoming good friends with the local residents. He spent many nights cooking beef rib-eye on his outdoor grill to trade with them for salmon. These new friends once escorted a paparazzo off the premises when the man tried to get pictures of Matthew.
When Matthew departed after the movie was over, the chief and his brothers gifted him with a handmade canoe paddle bearing the engraved image of the Squamish Nation’s thunderbird symbol. They called Matthew their brother and said that just as the paddle gives direction to the Squamish nation on the water, so this paddle could serve as Matthew’s compass during his travels. He recognized this as another profound greenlight, and their words inspired him to name his RV “the Canoe.”
Sometime afterward, he encountered another greenlight unexpectedly after driving all day through western Montana. He followed a campground sign in the hope of finding a stopping point so he could watch a college football game on his satellite TV, but instead he stumbled across a tavern with a colorful array of characters inside. These included the Cheyenne barmaid Asha; the grayed and grizzled Ed, who ran the bar; Josie, the tavern’s hotel manager, who had arrived two years earlier, gotten pregnant from a one-night stand, and stayed; and Sam, whose wife had died two weeks into their marriage many years ago, after which he called all the women at the bar names like “honey” and “sugar” because he couldn’t make himself say another woman’s name.
Sam recognized Matthew, bought him a drink, and introduced him to everybody. Matthew recognized the moment as an opportunity to get to know these interesting and very real people. So he chose to spend the night drinking with them and rolling dice with them. It was an accidental greenlight, and something far more fulfilling than watching football alone in his RV.
Matthew learned a hard lesson about the importance of balancing freedom with preparation. This exercise will help you to learn more about the balance of these intertwined principles in your own life.
Some people place too much emphasis on preparation and control. Others place too much emphasis on freedom and spontaneity. Which one are you?
Whichever way you answered the first question, describe a situation where your innate tendency caused you a problem. Maybe it was a missed opportunity or a botched performance. How did insisting on too much control, or too much spontaneity, end up hurting you?
Whichever side of this divide you fall on, why do you think that’s your comfort zone? What is it about the other approach that seems foreign or frightening to you?
What would it look like for you to achieve a better balance between your comfort zone and its opposite? What’s one specific action that you could take this week to begin building that better balance?
After three years on the road, Matthew began to crave a more settled and domestic lifestyle, one with clean sheets and more water pressure. This new period of life led him to a new house, a night in jail, a life of glittering pleasure and ease, and the world of romantic comedy movies. It also led him to take a movie role as a dragon slayer and to chase a dream to Africa, after which he could no longer accept the Hollywood life.
Matthew learned the following insights and lessons from this time:
Matthew ended his RV-days by renting a two-bedroom house in Tarrytown, a sleepy neighborhood in Austin. It was there that one of the most famous (or notorious) incidents in his life-after-fame took place.
One night after partying for 32 hours straight in sheer exuberance over a major win by his beloved football team, the Texas Longhorns, he decided to strip naked, smoke some weed, and play the bongo—an instrument that he cherishes, along with the conga and djembe, as one of the “purest” musical instruments. While he was thus engaged, two Austin police officers barged into his house and wrestled him to the ground. After some preliminary banter, during which he screamed at them for violating his rights, they arrested him for marijuana possession, disturbing the peace, and resisting arrest. When one of them tried to cover him with a blanket, Matthew insisted he would be taken outside naked as proof of his innocence, since a naked man in his own home had clearly been minding his own business.
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 full address, it brought an influx of attention and visitors that began to ruin the atmosphere of Tarrytown that he had cherished. In what he felt was fairness to the other residents, he decided to move out.
In 2000, Matthew felt it was time to return to the Hollywood hustle anyway, since his last few films—The Newton Boys, Contact, Amistad, and U-571—had underperformed, leaving him with fewer first-class acting offers. He worried that his career might be fading. But when he accepted a high-paying offer to star opposite Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner, this ushered him into the world of romantic comedies and an extended period of white-hot Hollywood excess.
He moved into the legendary Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, home to a revolving gallery of rising and falling stars, and quickly learned that life at the Chateau and life in the fictional world of romantic comedies are both built around the same principle: all greenlights. They’re all about a sustained string of affirmations as you skip weightlessly through the world. For 18 months, he enjoyed a time of hedonistic indulgence. It was a time filled with late nights, suntanning, the best food and drink, endless parties, and endless friends (many of them female).
Then the role of dragon slayer Denton Van Zan in Reign of Fire came along. Matthew loved playing this character. He says Van Zan taught him the deep value of duty, along with the value of affirming and owning your personal element of madness.
Amid the endless partying and gratification of his Hollywood life, Matthew had begun to question God’s existence as he placed more emphasis on self-reliance and free will. Playing Van Zan became an instrumental part of this. He realized that he wanted to pull away from his life of hedonism and start earning and deserving some of those easy Saturdays that he had been enjoying. The tough and rugged character of Van Zan, a man whose life revolved around a single, all-consuming purpose, felt important to him.
Playing the role also taught him how to play life by his own rules instead of letting Hollywood culture dictate his actions. To prepare for it, he began by shaving his head. This was partly because his hair had begun falling out anyway, and he had heard that shaving it was one way to make it grow again. But his new look also became part of his new self-determination when his bald head appeared in People magazine and a studio executive with a financial interest in Reign of Fire balked and threatened Matthew with some words about “bad karma.” In response, Matthew spent some time tanning his newly exposed scalp. Then he oiled it up, put on a fancy Gucci suit, and went to a Hollywood industry party, where his bald head was a hit. The studio executive later called him and raved excitedly about it.
Matthew’s preparations for playing Van Zan also involved some considerably more rigorous activities when he spent several weeks at his brother Mike’s West Texas ranch and developed his own brutal daily training regimen for becoming a dragon slayer. This included taking a double shot of tequila every morning, running barefoot in the desert for five miles, keeping his heart rate low as he stood on the edge of the barn’s roof, and going out into the fields at night to tackle cows. One by one, these exercises failed—the tequila made him sick, he couldn’t make himself go to the roof’s edge, his feet blistered so badly that he couldn’t walk, and he got a concussion from a cow’s headbutt. The upside was that he experienced a lot of pain, which was something the character of Van Zan knew all too well.
Three days after principal photography on Reign of Fire ended, Matthew had an exact repeat of his wet dream from several years earlier, complete with the same incongruous splicing of the Amazon with African tribesmen. This time, to pursue the dream’s meaning he chose to go to Africa.
He started by finding a guide, Issa, to help him navigate the African continent in pursuit of his dream’s meaning. For the first leg of his journey, he decided to track down one of his favorite musicians, the guitarist Ali Farka Touré. From the liner notes to a CD, he learned that the man lived in Niafunké, Mali. So Issa guided him there by boat, traveling up the Niger river, and the two of them spent a day having lunch with Ali and his wife. When Matthew asked Ali why he performed in West Africa and France but not elsewhere, he found the man’s reply striking: Ali said he would be nothing but dried shit—leaving no scent—in other places, whereas in Africa and France he was wet shit, so that his scent stayed with people.
After leaving Ali, Matthew learned from Issa that some people who lived nearby, called the Dogon, were said to have received an extraterrestrial transmission of astronomical knowledge long before the birth of modern astronomy. Matthew took this as a mystical sign in alignment with his dream, and they traveled up the Niger to visit the Dogon.
On the way to see the Dogon, Matthew and Issa stopped at Timbuktu and visited with two of Issa’s friends, Ali and Amadou. The interaction taught Matthew a different way of communication than what Americans are used to, one based not on the attempt to win arguments but on the attempt to understand another person better.
At the hotel, they all noticed a young woman who was a prostitute. Ali and Amadou began to argue over whether she should or should not be living that way. When Matthew interjected that he thought Ali, who disagreed with the prostitution, was right, both Ali and Amadou told him sharply that it wasn’t a matter of “right” or “wrong” but of understanding. When Matthew sheepishly said he was sorry, Amadou told him not to be sorry, but to be different.
When Matthew and Issa eventually reached the Dogon people, he learned an important lesson about accepting challenges even if you think you’re destined to lose. He and Issa visited several Dogon villages, where Matthew—still bald, bearded, and ruggedly healthy from Reign of Fire—told everyone he met that he was a writer and boxer named David. At the village of Begnemato, the village’s champion wrestler, Michel, challenged Matthew to a wrestling match in a dirt pit. Although a bit apprehensive, Matthew accepted when he reflected that if he refused, he would live the rest of his life wondering if he could have faced such a challenge. The village crowd went wild with excitement.
Surrounded by the cheering villagers, and refereed by the chief, Matthew and Michel fought two brutal rounds in the pit, with Matthew holding his own against Michel’s powerful attacks. Matthew emerged bruised and bloody, far worse for the wear than Michel. But the chief held up both of their hands and declared the match a tie. The villagers chanted enthusiastically, “Daouda! Daouda!” (“David” in Bambara, the local dialect).
When Matthew left the village the next day, Michel met him at its edge and walked with him 15 miles to the next village, holding his hand and saying nothing. That night, Issa told Matthew that everybody had expected Matthew to lose the wrestling match because Michel was actually the champion not just of Begnemato but three other villages. He said winning was really just about accepting the challenge. When Matthew accepted, he had already won. Matthew took this as another greenlight. He realized that he had left his “scent” with the Dogon people, just like Ali Farka had talked about.
Upon his return to Los Angeles, Matthew felt changed. In Africa he had felt fully at home, relaxed, and settled into his real self with his new friends. Now this left him with no tolerance for the glittering, chattering hedonism of the Chateau.
So he left the Chateau and headed for the beach, where he lived for the next few years, trading fancy suits for shorts and a surfboard. This was the period when the media rebranded him as the shirtless rom-com guy with a surfboard. And he did indeed star in a slew of rom-coms, including How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Sahara, and Failure to Launch. He found such movies enjoyable to make, regarding each one as a gift of breezy fun to the audience.
However, after a while he began to feel as if he had become an entertainer instead of an actor. The rom-coms felt too easy. They no longer nourished his creative spirit. He felt more enlarged and deepened from his traveling than from his career. This feeling grew so pronounced that he began to consider leaving the acting profession altogether, maybe to become a writer or teacher, or maybe a musician or football coach. Matthew remembered a philosophy he’d learned from the late Darrel Royal, football coach at the University of Texas: Your life is a book, and when you need a change, you can just “turn the page.” It was this kind of page-turning transition that Matthew felt he now needed.
Looking for a change, and laying seeds for a possible new future, he bought a new house in the Hollywood hills, one with a big yard and enough space for a family.
Matthew writes about the idea of “turning the page” of your life when you need a significant change. This exercise will help you to reflect on this idea and apply it to your life.
We’ve all gone through page-turning transitions in our lives, times when everything changed dramatically. What was one of yours?
Did you choose to turn the page, or did it feel like it was turned for you, by forces outside your control?
What points of life transition can you see in your experience right now and/or in the future? (What page will you need to turn?)
What can you start doing right now to increase your voluntary participation in these transitions? How can you train yourself and position yourself to choose when and how you’ll turn the pages of your life instead of having them turned for you?
Matthew had decided to turn the page on his life by buying a house where he might be able to raise a family. Now he just had to figure out what his life’s next chapter would be about. Little did he know that he would soon meet the woman of his dreams, get married, become a father, and leave Hollywood to return to his home state of Texas.
This period of his life brought home the following lessons and insights:
Almost as if on schedule, as if designed to signal yet another life transition and another vision to be pursued, Matthew had another non-sexual wet dream. This one was different from the first two. In it, he was an 88-year-old man sitting on the front porch of a country home and being visited by 22 young women. Each brought with her four children. He recognized these were women he had loved and children he had fathered, one child for each year of his life.
When he woke up, he realized that his lifelong desire to be a father and his fear of dying a bachelor—the latter of which had lately been looming as a major red light—were both okay. Whether or not he ever met and married the woman of his dreams, he could still know love and father children. The fearsome red light of lifelong bachelorhood had now become a green light through the impact of that dream, freeing him to surrender and let a long-term relationship with the right woman simply find him, or not.
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 together, just soaking up each other’s company. When he dropped her off, she invited him to call her.
To Matthew, it felt as if the mermaid that he’d glimpsed in the Amazon ten years earlier had somehow swum up from South America to find him. It was one of the biggest greenlights of his life.
A year into their relationship, Matthew invited Camila to live with him in Australia while he worked on the movie Fool’s Gold. While there, they spent six days living together in Papua New Guinea in a one-room treehouse near the jungle without electricity. One day during that adventure, he asked her what he would have to do to lose her, and she told him the way to lose her would simply be for him to change. This was another greenlight.
Once back from Australia, Matthew and Camila started a new life together in earnest by leaving his home in Hollywood Hills and moving into his RV, “the Canoe,” in the Malibu Beach RV park. They also started trying to get pregnant.
Several months later, Matthew came home one evening to find that they had succeeded. Camila showed him ultrasound photos of their unborn child, and they cried tears of joy together. For Matthew, becoming a father was the culmination and validation of the core values that his family had impressed into him from earliest childhood. It was 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 even more on this new center of his life. So he decided to shut down other obligations—including a film production company and a record label that he had created—and devote more attention to his family, his j.k. livin foundation, and his acting.
Matthew’s and Camila’s baby boy was born on July 7, 2008, at 6:22 p.m. They gave careful thought to choosing a name. The baby’s birth time carried deep symbolic resonance. Matthew’s favorite Bible verse, which he had relied on for decades as a source of spiritual guidance, was Matthew 6:22: “If thine eye be single, thy whole body will be full of light.” With this in mind, Matthew and Camila named their first child Levi—the biblical Matthew’s other name in the Bible. The birth of and naming of Matthew’s and Camila’s first child was a greenlight.
Shortly after the birth of Levi, Matthew and Camila traveled briefly to Texas because of a McConaughey family emergency. They rented a house in Kay’s retirement community, where Matthew came to love the elderly residents with their lack of pretension and sense of humor.
One evening after he and Camila had played bingo with their new friends, they were stopped at a red light, and Camila told Matthew that she knew he wanted to move back to Texas. And indeed he did. He had come to yearn for the more earthy and authentic life of his home state, away from the superficial glitz of Hollywood. He also wanted to be nearer to Kay, who was now in her late seventies. Moreover, he wanted to raise his family there.
When he told Camila that she was right, she took a deep breath, grinned, called him a son of a bitch, and agreed to do it. Then the red light they were stopped at turned green.
They bought a home and nine acres on the edge of Austin—plenty of room to raise a family and even play the bongos if you wanted. As they settled in, Matthew’s recent family emergency, combined with his new fatherhood, made him even more reflective about his life and its meaning in the face of mortality. He realized that the acting roles coming his way weren’t satisfying him anymore. Strangely, the characters he was creating onscreen were less vibrant and deep than his real life, which was increasingly passionate and vital. As an actor, he wanted to tell stories that challenged and engaged him on that same level of vitality.
He knew it was time for yet another change in his career, some kind of authentic sacrifice—especially since Camila was pregnant again.
When Camila was pregnant, Matthew narrowed his focus by cutting various things out of his life. He identifies this paring away of extraneous activities and relationships as the key to genius. This exercise will help you identify areas where you may be able to narrow your own focus to unleash your potential for genius.
What are the major obligations that fill up your life right now? What people, organizations, and activities claim the majority of your time, energy, and attention?
In your heart of hearts, what’s the most important claim on your life at this moment? For Matthew when he learned Camila was pregnant, it was his family. What is it for you—a person, a project? Name only one or two things.
Which of your obligations could you let go of? Which don’t support your most important priorities?
What specific actions can you do this week to narrow your focus and free up more of your time, energy, and attention for the most important things in your life?
With a second child on the way and a new life to live with his new family in their new house in Texas, Matthew knew that this time, changing his career direction would be a different experience. This time, he had more than just himself to take into account. The next 20 months would test his resolve as he rejected his established public image and waited for the world to catch up. This period would bring the death of his current “brand” but also the birth of a daughter and the birth of a new public image. It would lead, ultimately, to a Hollywood McConaissance.
Insights and lessons from this period include the following:
In Fall 2008, Matthew realized it was time for yet another change. This one would remove him from the movie industry for an indefinite period.
He checked on his finances to verify whether he and his family could survive with some disruption to their income. Finding that everything was solid, he called his agent and said he wanted to stop accepting roles in romantic comedies. He knew this was a risky move in a business where saying “pass” on too many projects can lead to a situation where you don’t receive any offers at all. But he felt that he had to do it.
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.
A little over a year into this somewhat worrisome time, on January 3, 2010, Camila gave birth to her and Matthew’s second child. They named her Vida. For Matthew, her birth was a pure greenlight. It led him to reflect on the importance of getting past the glow of a honeymoon and settling into real life, which doesn’t burn as brightly, but which isn’t supposed to, because otherwise it would burn out. The only honeymoon that lasts forever, he mused, is the one between a man and his daughter.
He began to reflect on the notion that real life after a honeymoon is like exiting the theater after a movie. The movie was wonderful, and it was so much larger than life. But the real world outside the theater, where we really live, is so much more vivid and fulfilling, even though it’s harder to live in. In the real world, you encounter real love, real pain, and real experiences, and these make you a real person.
Around the same time that Vida was born, the offers from Hollywood started drying up. Eventually, after 20 months of Matthew’s refusals, no more offers came in at all. Matthew had stood by his guns, and Hollywood had gotten the message: He wasn’t going to be the breezy rom-com guy, nor was he going to be the shirtless guy on the beach. Fine, said Hollywood, and it picked up its scripts and withdrew, leaving him alone at last.
In the new career silence, Matthew devoted himself to loving Camila, raising his children, and doing things like writing, gardening, praying, and visiting with old friends.
Then, something magical happened: New offers started pouring in. Matthew’s long absence had effectively “unbranded” him, and now it seemed a brash and inventive move to offer him the role of, say, a defense attorney, not in a rom-com but in a drama (The Lincoln Lawyer). Suddenly, it was gutsy and cool to offer him the lead role in Killer Joe. The former shirtless rom-com guy was now the new face of creative casting in dramatic roles.
Other offers rapidly followed, and Matthew was back in business. He appeared in Bernie, directed by his old friend Richard Linklater. He starred in Mud, which writer-director Jeff Nichols wrote with Matthew specifically in mind. He starred in Magic Mike. The offers soon became a flood. There were so many that he felt he couldn’t do all the roles he wanted to. In one of his ultimate career greenlights, Hollywood “rediscovered” him.
In this unprecedented situation, Camila proved a ferocious ally. At one point, he dearly wanted to do The Paperboy, Magic Mike, and Mud. But he feared their back-to-back production schedules would mean he wouldn’t have time to adequately prepare for each role, let alone to do justice to his family. It was Camila who convinced him to take all three roles. Reach between your legs, she told him. Grab your manhood. Find a way to make it work. So that’s what he did.
Back in 2007, Matthew had obtained the rights to the screenplay for Dallas Buyers Club, and ever since then had wanted to play the lead role of Ron Woodroof. At the time, though, he couldn’t find a director or producers (for financing) who’d sign on to such a serious film with a rom-com actor like himself in the lead. But now, in January 2012, after his rebranding, it wasn’t such a crazy idea. In fact, it was a dynamite one, and he couldn’t wait to execute it.
First, he secured the Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée, director of C.R.A.Z.Y., which Matthew loved. Then he began losing weight to play Woodroof. For five months, he lost two and a half pounds a week by eating a diet of three egg whites for breakfast and five ounces of fish plus a cup of steamed vegetables for lunch and dinner, supplemented by all the wine he wanted. He also studied Ron Woodroof’s life carefully and started trying to get inside the man’s headspace. To this end, he traveled to meet the man’s sister and daughter, and they told him all about Ron, showing Matthew old VHS tapes and letting Matthew read Ron’s diary. During this preparation, Matthew found his extreme weight loss—from 182 to 135 pounds—created an intensely focused mental state that helped him prepare for the role.
Despite the fact that his agent said there was no money for the project, Matthew insisted during preproduction that Dallas Buyers Club would shoot in the fall of 2012. When the time finally rolled around, he, Vallée, and the producers had managed to raise only $4.9 million of the projected $7 million budget. Even so, they agreed that they would go ahead and start filming, confident that the rest of the money would eventually appear. But in the end, it didn’t. They made the movie in 25 days for $4.9 million.
Dallas Buyers Club was released in 2013 to a burst of Oscar buzz, which added momentum to a term that the press had started using some months earlier to refer to Matthew’s cinematic resurgence: The McConaissance. Unbeknownst to anybody but him, this was actually a word that he had made up himself and fed to a journalist at that year’s Sundance Film Festival, saying that he had just “heard” it from some other writer. This proved a successful ploy. The term stuck, and everybody started using it. And now, with people chattering about the Oscar-winning potential of the lead performance in Dallas Buyers Club, it appeared the Matthew McConaughey Renaissance was only just getting started.
Matthew walked away from his successful brand in Hollywood to pursue the creative projects that would mean real success to him. This exercise will help you define what success means to you.
What are some of the real successes you’ve achieved in life? Focus not on outward acclaim but your inward sense of happiness and accomplishment. What have you done that has made you feel like you really accomplished something worthwhile? (If possible, name several things.)
Think about the general principle behind all of your successes. What do they point toward? Beyond the specifics, what does success mean to you, personally? Write it out directly: “To me, success means..,”
In what ways have other people tried to define success for you? What are some roles, projects, or goals that others have wanted you to pursue, but that didn’t feel meaningful to you?
What can you do this week to act on your principles and make progress toward more success in your life?
Even as the McConaissance unfolded, Matthew’s life continued to be not just about his career, but about his family. Camila and the kids were at the center of his thoughts and plans, and soon he felt the need to make a more formal commitment to them. At the same time, he won the biggest accolade of his acting career (an Oscar), only to find himself soon questioning his future direction as an actor. When he reached the age of 50, his thoughts turned toward both backward and forward, leading him to reflect on where he had been and where he was going.
Insights and lessons from this period include the following:
When Matthew and Camila’s son Levi was three, he asked Matthew why he, his sister Vida, and Matthew all had the last name McConaughey but their mother didn’t. Matthew realized that it was high time he got over his fear of losing himself through marriage.
So he went and talked with his pastor, Dave Haney, who explained marriage as a relationship in which two people don’t lose themselves but become more of themselves. Haney asked Matthew what would be the bigger sacrifice, to continue on his current life adventure or to accept the adventure of marriage. With that thought, Matthew came to understand marriage not as a final destination but a new journey, and one that he could take with the very woman he wanted to be with for the rest of his life. He realized that he not only wanted but needed to get married.
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.
It was during this period that HBO’s True Detective came along. Matthew loved playing detective Rustin Cohle, whose striking inner life—Cohle was both a fierce seeker of truth and a thoroughgoing nihilist—excited him. The series aired on HBO during the movie awards season, which worked out well as it raised his profile just as he was seeking attention for his role in Dallas Buyers Club.
He went on to do well during that awards season, sweeping the Critics’ Choice, Golden Globes, Independent Spirit, and Screen Actors Guild awards for best actor for his portrayal of Ron Woodroff. The only thing left was the Academy Award. He deliberately didn’t plan a speech, fearing that this would be bad karma.
When he won the Oscar for Best Actor, it seemed a validation of all the risky and difficult career choices that he had made in recent years. It was also confirmation that, in fulfillment of his father’s and Camila’s orders about his filmmaking career, he most certainly wasn’t half-assing it.
In the wake of his Oscar win, Matthew made many more movies, including Interstellar, Free State of Jones, and Gold. But even though these fulfilled him creatively, something apparently wasn’t translating to the public, because the movies weren’t financial successes. He didn’t know if the reason lay with him, the stories, the distributors, pure luck, or something else.
The uncertainty over his post-Oscar box office returns made him even more committed to his craft. He began bringing an increasing level of intensity and absorption to the fictional characters whose lives he inhabited on the screen. Then, one day, he realized that these characters had come to feel more vital to him than the story that was his real life. He had become a true actor-artist, finding consequence, danger, and excitement in his art. It was an exhilarating discovery.
But it also made him realize that 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 35 years of his writings, the scraps of reflection and insight that he had been keeping since the age of 15. Re-encountering his former selves, he realized that his first twenty years had been a time of learning to value values such as respect, courage, fairness, good humor, service, and a certain rough love of adventure.
His twenties and thirties were “conservative” decades, during when he cared more about not running red lights than finding green ones. He spent those years getting rid of conditions and truths that felt counter-grain to him, so that he could find his real self.
His forties were a more affirming time when he put the truths he had learned into action. They were a time when he created many new greenlights even as he saw many reds and yellows from his past turn green. The net result was that he caught more greenlights than he ever had before.
As he was finishing this book in 2020, both the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd rocked the world. Matthew sees both phenomena playing out according to the principles of inevitability and relativity. For example, the disruption of our collective lives by COVID-19 presented new inevitabilities such as social distancing and quarantining, while the disruption brought on by George Floyd’s murder presented the inevitabilities of outrage, protests, and riots. In both cases, we all had to get relative by persisting, pivoting, and sacrificing. Through the turbulence, we got to know our families and ourselves better. We learned to hear each other in new ways. 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.
He has now taken on the self-designated position of “Minister of Culture” to promote a culture of shared values and competence in cities, institutions, athletics, and education. Drawing from his earliest life lessons, he regards values as intrinsically nondenominational and bipartisan. In a world where so many people are divided, he says values are what unite us. This is why promoting value competency, along with competency in general, can bring us together.
Ultimately, in Matthew’s view, the art of living goes back to the concept of greenlights, combined with the concepts of relativity and inevitability. To live wisely means to recognize that the ultimate inevitability in your life is death. Therefore, as you make choices and seek to catch greenlights, think about the way these choices will shape your eventual eulogy. In other words, begin with the end in mind. Living this way represents the ultimate fusion of relativity with inevitability and the surest way to fill your experience with one greenlight after another.
Matthew’s concept of living wisely by beginning with the end (your death) in mind can serve as a focusing tool for planning what you want to accomplish. This exercise guides you through applying it.
How do you want to be remembered? What do you want your eventual eulogy to say?
Right now, how far is your life from the description in that eulogy? What accomplishments, character qualities, or other things in that eulogy are not present or not fully developed in your current life?
How can you “close the gap”? What things need to happen, and what things do you need to do, for you to become the person described in that eulogy?
Get very specific: What actions can you take this week, this month, today, to begin shaping the story of your life so that when you die, you will have lived well and been successful (in the deepest meaning of that word for you)?