Learning from Life’s Green Lights and Red Lights: My Never Stand Still Conversation with Matthew McConaughey

With an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and a New York Times bestselling memoir under his belt, it’s safe to say that Matthew McConaughey is a household name. While he rose to prominence acting in romantic comedies, his pivot to acting in dramas skyrocketed him into the upper echelons of Hollywood, and he hasn’t looked back.

I was thrilled to hear directly from Matthew on my Never Stand Still podcast. I’ve been a fan of his films for a long time, and after reading his recent memoir, Greenlights, I became a fan of his philosophy: that life has red lights, yellow lights, and green lights, and each has a lesson to learn. The lessons Matthew writes about in Greenlights reminded me of one of my own mantras—that if you’re standing still, you’re asking to be hit. We had the chance to talk about these similarities on the podcast. We also spoke about his acting career, what he’s learned from life’s “red lights,” and the lessons he’s learned from loss. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and I wanted to share some of my takeaways.

We can’t let our “red lights” get the better of us

Matthew spoke about the title of his book, which came to him 45 days into writing it. “We love green lights…on this highway of life…They say go onward…Yellow lights slow us down…A red light actually stops us in our tracks,” he explained. “Green lights, I did find later in life that I truly believe there’s no way I would’ve gotten those if I didn’t have the red or yellow light in the past that had a lesson in it for me.” He said that we can’t know exactly when we’ll learn the lessons from our red and yellow lights. We could know immediately, or near the end of our life, or we may never know and our grandchildren will be the ones to learn them. “In the rear view mirror of life, the red and yellows are a green as well,” Matthew told me.

Matthew will be the first to admit he’s in a privileged position, and that some of his green lights have fallen into his lap. He also knows that there are many people out there who have experienced more red lights than green lights. I asked him to share his advice for those who are facing challenges. “When faced with the inevitable, we got to get relative and, one, start to measure, what red lights were actually yellow?” He said. “Which ones did I create? Okay, I can do something about those. And which ones are inevitable, which I can’t do anything about those? So, pivot or persist, or wave the white flag. Sometimes we get through a red light by sitting there and waiting that son of a gun out. Sometimes we get through a yellow light, pausing, let it turn red because we need to stop in our life…Sometimes we get through to a red, yellow light, and we don’t need to give that crisis credit, so prep the pedal to the metal and…blow the yellow light, drive through it.” He told me that he believes while we can’t control everything, we can choose whether or not to be victimized by a situation, and we should never give up hope.

One of my red lights came when I was a senior in high school. Every single college I’d applied to had rejected me. I ended up driving a truck for six months while I reapplied to schools and I was eventually accepted to Middlebury College for the spring semester. I couldn’t control the situation, but I did everything I could to make the best of it and turned the experience into a “yellow light” and simply waited until the time was right. In the meantime, I didn’t give up hope.

We can grow from loss

Our worst experiences often shape who we are. For Matthew, losing his dad was a major blow that forced him to reevaluate his life. He said, “I physically lose the one person in this world that’s bigger than government or law that I know will have my back,” he told me. “Now he’s gone, and I’m like, ‘Whoa, you better get your peripheral vision going, buddy. You better get your chin up and your heart high and start being the man that your dad’s been trying to teach you to be, instead of trying to act like the man.’ That would be a big one that really kickstarted me to have the courage and the confidence to go, ‘You better start owning yourself, Matthew.’” After this realization, he told me, his outlook changed. He became less fearful and started to feel like things were within his grasp. Matthew admitted to me he’s not sure if he would have experienced the same growth if his father, who he calls his “safety net,” was still here today.

My sister was only 20 years old when she died unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm. Her death turned my world upside down. I was at AT&T at the time, and I’d been working my way up in the company. But suddenly, I stopped caring about getting ahead. I needed time to grieve. I was leading a project team, and my teammates rallied around me and ensured that we were successful. When I came back and gave the project report to my boss, I made sure to tell my boss that the team was responsible for the project’s success. From that moment on, I learned the power of giving credit to your teammates and the fact that no individual can go at it alone—those realizations helped me grow.

Risk can lead to reward

We’ve all had those moments where we had to decide between taking a risk and standing still. For Matthew, he took a big risk with his career when he made the decision to move from being the leading man in romantic comedies to becoming a dramatic actor. “It was a risk, I was buying a one-way ticket, maybe, out of Hollywood,” he said. ?

At the time, he had just welcomed a son into the world, and he wanted a way to express the range of emotions he was feeling. “In the structure of a romantic comedy, the bandwidth of emotions is somewhat compressed,” he explained. “You can’t get too high, and you can’t get too low…I want[ed] to see if my work can be as challenging or as vital as can challenge the vitality of life.” This led to nearly two years during which he turned down script after script for different, lucrative romantic comedies, without the promise of a drama, no matter how much of a paycut he was willing to take. “My hunch is that sent a little bit of an invisible lightning bolt through Hollywood that, ‘Oh, McConaughey is not bluffing. He is really not doing rom-coms.’” And just as he was beginning to come to terms with the likelihood that he may need to explore other career options, he received a call. “Now, after 22 months of being gone…I got anonymity,” he said. “Well, in the ‘where’s he been?’ came, ‘You know who’d be an…interesting actor to play this role in this drama? Matthew McConaughey.’ Well, I answered that call. They came and I said, ‘Let’s get after it.’” It’s been 12 years since that call, and he’s been acting in dramas ever since.

Matthew’s willingness to take a risk with his career is something I can relate to. After spending 18 years working at AT&T, working my way up from an entry-level role to the senior leadership team, I wanted a change. I could have stayed and continued to steadily grow my career at the company, but I made a riskier move and took a job at Priceline.com. It was during that time that I met my friend and mentor, Richard Branson. Two years later, I went to work for Richard at Virgin Mobile. I’ve always been passionate about making a positive impact on society, and Richard gave me the permission to launch a business that did just that. In each job I’ve been in ever since, including at PayPal, I’ve made sure that we’re doing right by society. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of, and taking a risk led to some of the most rewarding moments of my career.

I hope you enjoy listening to my conversation with Matthew as much as I enjoyed speaking with him. Listen to our full conversation below and leave a comment to let me know what other lessons you took away from it.