This week's book: "Greenlights" by Matthew McConaughey.
"Persist, pivot, or concede. It's up to us, our choice every time."
Matthew McConaughey
Not every green light starts out green.
That's the idea running through this week's book, and it took me straight back to one of my first tastes of being an entrepreneur.
I was 18, the summer after my freshman year of college, and I took a job with a small painting company. It was hard work for lousy pay. The boss was rarely around, and there was never enough work to keep us busy. If I'd ever seen a red light, that was it.
So another painter, a guy also named Mike, and I decided to take matters into our own hands. Instead of waiting around for that job to get better, we'd start our own. We called it Town Painting. We printed up 50 flyers, drove out to one of Chicago's nicest suburbs, and went door to door handing them out.
A few days later, we had our first customer. That one job paid us $20,000, many times what we'd have earned all summer working for someone else. We bought the paint, bought the equipment, and just like that, we were in business. Then I did it again the next summer.
That lousy summer job turned out to be one of the biggest green lights of my young life. But here's the part I want to highlight, and it's a central point of McConaughey's book: the light didn't turn green on its own. We turned it.
In my mind, that's what Greenlights is really about. McConaughey tells the wild, funny, honest story of his own life, but underneath the Hollywood tales is a genuinely useful idea. A green light is a yes, a go, a moment when things open up and you move forward. Some greenlights come to us by luck. But many of them we create ourselves, by the choices we make and the way we respond when the light is stuck on red. As he puts it, we can persist, pivot, or concede. Our choice.
That summer, the easy move was to concede, stay in the bad job and be satisfied with a small paycheck. Instead, we pivoted, adjusted, and persisted. And a red light turned green.
The promise for the week: by Saturday you'll have McConaughey's framework for catching more green lights, an honest take on what holds up and what's just good storytelling, and a few of his lessons you can put to work in your own life. This one's a change of pace from last week's money talk. It's a book about living and being authentic to yourself.
Quick question to start the week: what's a red light in your life right now that might just be a green light you haven't turned yet? Hit reply, I love to read every one.
I'll go first: for years, "I'm not a writer" was my red light. Turns out it was green the whole time. I just had to start.
Reading ahead?
Next week we're reading "Atomic Habits" by James Clear. If you like to follow along, now's a good time to grab a copy so it's on your shelf by Monday. Forgot to order in time? The Kindle version is instant.
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Talk tomorrow,
Mike
Practical wisdom for the life you're building