What:

Athenian Dialogue

When:

Sunday, May 5, 2024, 9:00 am - 3:30 pm

Where:

Montana Municipal Institute Conference, Fairmont Hot Springs, Butte, MT

PLEASE NOTE: This is an in-person event only. No virtual attendance will be available. 

Facilitator:

Nikki Brummond, Finance Officer/Clerk, City of Lewistown

Book:

Back by popular demand! Greenlights, by Matthew McConaughey

Price:

$35.00 (Does NOT include the book. Participants are responsible for obtaining and reading the book prior to the Dialogue.) 

Payment:

Please submit credit card payment through the payment portal.

Capacity:

25 participants

Registration Deadline:

Moday, April 22, 2024

Credits:

Municipal clerks may earn 6 CMC or MMC education hours (equal to 3 CMC or MMC education points) for participation in this event.

Before You Arrive:

Read the entire text, take notes in the sections that resonate with you, and bring the book and your notes with you to the dialogue.

  

  

Description:

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Discover 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.

The book is available at your local book store or on Amazon. Participants are responsible for obtaining and reading the book prior to the Dialogue.

 

What is an Athenian Dialogue?

Athenian Dialogues are 6-hour intensive conversations that allow participants to explore leadership theory, practice, and principles.

Clerks have the opportunity to relate their experiences in public leadership roles to the book's themes and key ideas, drawing connections and insights they can apply in their professional and personal lives.

This opportunity for rich, deeply engaged conversation and shared insight is a treasured Institute tradition and not to be missed!

Montana State University Extension Local Government CenterIIMC