#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - MORE THAN FOUR MILLION COPIES SOLD! Discover the life-changing memoir that has inspired millions of readers through the Academy Award(R)-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. The short dust jacket included with this hardcover edition is an intentional design choice.