This week's book: "Greenlights" by Matthew McConaughey.
"In time, yesterday's red light leads us to a greenlight."
Matthew McConaughey
It's Saturday, so let's pull the week together.
This week was a change of pace, a memoir instead of a how-to. But underneath Matthew McConaughey's wild stories is a genuinely useful idea about how to live: pay attention to the green lights and the red ones, and to what each is trying to teach you. A green light is a yes, a go, a moment when things open up. Some arrive by luck. Many we create by our choices and by how we respond when the light is stubbornly red.
Here's the week in a few lines. We started with my own first green light, being 18 with 50 flyers, a car, and one friend, and turning a lousy summer painting job into a business, because the light doesn't turn green on its own. You turn it. Then we looked at the art of preparing without over-preparing, McConaughey gets caught thinking his talent alone is enough and doesn’t prepare only to arrive on set and find his lines are in Spanish. Then, he so over-rehearsed for a scene that a director had to tell him to put the script down and just be himself. And we watched Tiger Woods win the Masters by twelve shots and then tear his swing apart to get better, proof that staying hungry after you've had some success is a whole different skill than getting good in the first place.
But the story I keep coming back to this week is one of my own, because it's the truest red-light-to-green tale I've got.
One college summer, a friend and I drove to Oklahoma to work the oil patch. Our first night in town, an hour after we arrived, we walked out of our cheap motel toward the diner across the street, and there was an ambulance are several police cars with lights flashing. A shooting, right where we were headed. Red light. Time to turn around and go home?
For a week, we couldn't find a place to live. Red light. Time to turn around and go home?
Every morning at 4:30 we put our names in at the company yard hoping to get on a crew. No work. Red light. Time to turn around and go home?
But we kept moving. We opened bank accounts. We camped at a forest preserve. We walked up and down the downtown streets asking strangers if they had a basement or an attic we could rent. Finally, a kind woman pointed us to a brand-new duplex we could just afford. Green light. Time to stay?
We moved into the duplex and the very next day I got put on a good crew. Green light. Time to stay?
It would have been so easy to quit, drive home, take another painting job for the summer. Instead, the red lights turned green and I stayed the whole season, came home with more money than I needed, and paid my own college expenses, including tuition, for the entire next year.
That's the whole book, right there, in one summer. The red lights come whether you want them or not. What you control is whether you keep moving forward long enough to catch them when they turn green.
My honest take on the book: it's not an instruction manual, and if you come to it looking for a neat system, you'll be frustrated. It's messy, wild, occasionally profound, and very much one man's story rather than a formula. But it's honest, beautifully told, and buried in the chaos of his young life are real truths about paying attention to what is happening around you. And the audiobook, which he narrates himself, is one of the best you'll ever hear.
One challenge for the week ahead
Think of a red light in your life right now, something that feels like a setback, a closed door, a no. Instead of fighting it, ask a different question: what might this be redirecting me toward? You don't have to force an answer. Just hold the possibility that this red light is pointing you at a green one you can't see yet.
When in your life has one of your red lights turned green? Hit reply, I read every one.
I'll go first: leaving the money world felt like a red light for years. It turned out to be the green one that led me here.
Next week
We're reading "Atomic Habits" by James Clear, maybe the most practical book ever written on how small daily actions compound into a completely different life. After a week of McConaughey's big, wild story, we go small on purpose, because the little things, done daily, are what build the big life. If you'd like to read along, this weekend's a good time to grab a copy, and the Kindle version is instant.
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I'll be back Monday,
Mike