#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 6 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE! Now in paperback and with
exclusive new content the life-changing memoir that has inspired millions of readers through
the Academy Award–winning actor’s unflinching honesty unconventional wisdom and lessons
learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction. “The No. 1 celebrity memoir of
the past 10 years.”— USA Today “McConaughey’s book invites us to grapple with the lessons of
his life as he did—and to see that the point was never to win but to understand.”—Mark Manson
author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck I’ve been in this life for fifty years been
trying to work out its riddle for forty-two and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle
for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures joys and sorrows things that
made me marvel and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less
stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man.
How to have meaning in life. How to be more me. Recently I worked up the courage to sit down
with those diaries. I found stories I experienced lessons I learned and forgot poems prayers
prescriptions beliefs about what matters some great photographs and a whole bunch of bumper
stickers. I found a reliable theme an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction at
the time and still: If you know how and when to deal with life’s challenges—how to get
relative with the inevitable —you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights.”
So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album a record a story of my
life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens felts and figured-outs cools and
shamefuls. Graces truths and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs getting caughts and
getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops. Hopefully it’s medicine that
tastes good a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary a spaceship to Mars without needing
your pilot’s license going to church without having to be born again and laughing through the
tears. It’s a love letter. To life. It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights—and to
realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too. Good luck.
