The book that changed Matthew McConaughey’s life
There are very few actors that have enjoyed quite the career that Matthew McConaughey has. After coming through in the 1990s, McConaughey somehow found himself in the unwanted position of being typecast as a leading rom-com man, and as a result, he made the decision to turn similar offers down for a number of years.
It was a gamble that paid off, and eventually, the Texan actor began featuring in the kind of roles he always wanted to get, with star turns in projects such as True Detective and Interstellar. Suddenly, he was one of the greatest actors of his generation, a reality he had dreamed up years earlier. Much of that process is detailed in McConaughey’s excellent 2020 book Greenlights.
Greenlights was written by the actor while he was in the desert for 52 days and details his personal and professional life, drawn from previous diaries and journals. Not only had McConaughey become one of the best actors of his generation, but he also emerged with considerable literary prowess.
McConaughey once admitted that his youth was not spent reading, even despite the array of excellent Texas authors being available to him. “I actually did not grow up as much of a reader; I’m a very slow reader,” the actor said before pointing out one of the books that captivated him later in life.
“I love reading… like, I picked up [Ralph Waldo] Emerson’s essays and I got turned on to Emerson’s essay on self-reliance, and it’s like 23 pages long,” McConaughey noted. “That took me six months to read. Because I would read like two sentences and go, ‘Whoa, I gotta put the book down. I’ve got to take that into life and see if I can apply that’.”
Emerson was a progenitor of the transcendentalist philosophical and literary movement of the mid-19th, which championed the importance of self-reliance and critical thinking. It looks as though the American writer’s essays were of great importance to McConaughey, particularly when it came to writing Greenlights.
But there’s one book that McConaughey admits he holds closer to his heart than any other, and in the same interview, he noted the importance of Og Mandino’s book The Greatest Salesman in the World, admitting it is the “book that I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you with the life I have if it didn’t find me.”
Madino’s book is a philosophy of being a salesman and tells of a poor camel boy who achieves a life of wealth and success. McConaughey explained why the book is so vital to him, saying, “You know we have those things in our life that mean more to us because we didn’t have a teacher go ‘you need to read this’ or a friend go ‘you gotta read this.’ That find us in the middle like a needle in a haystack?”
The actor added: “That book found me at a time in my life when I was at a real crossroads about what I was going to do in my life, which was really going to film school instead of becoming a lawyer, really doubling down on enacting the values that my dad taught me, but maybe I didn’t have the courage to put into action. ‘You need to really become the man you’re trying to become and quit talking about it and start doing it and start being one’.”
