Matthew McConaughey on His Approach to Acting: “Don’t worry about the result, get your head down as an actor”

Despite writing for a website called Daily Actor, I usually don’t put much stake into acting awards (especially since they are so many of them). However, I have found it hard not to enjoy Matthew McConaughey‘s award season success, not only because it is well-deserved but because his speeches have been so off-the-wall fantastic. The Dallas Buyers Club star just has such a way with words, and even if half of them together don’t make logical sense the way he says it just sounds so gosh darn good.

One would think McConaughey would have other talents relating to this way with words. Curiously, though McConaughey has only written one film project (a 1998 short titled The Rebel, which he also directed and starred in), he tells The Wall Street Journal, “I write a lot more than I read.”  He explains that good writing will inspire him, saying, “I’m a very slow reader but good writing will set into me and then I’ll have to put a marker, and I want to go see if I can apply these philosophies to life.”

But when it comes to his own writing, he elaborates, “I do a lot of writing. Journal entries, social commentary, philosophies, life approaches. I try to dissect most things in my life and things of other people that I know that have been successful, and dissect success. I noticed it’s so much easier to dissect failure but I found it to be important to go ‘hey, really take a moment with yourself, dissect what’s going on when things are going well!’ Because there’s a science to it, you know? Just as there’s a science to not being satisfied or not being as excited about the day, there’s  a science to being excited about what you’re heading into. A lot of that for me and my work has been process, process, process. Don’t worry about the result, get your head down as an actor. It’s always one at a time, and that’s one of the fun things about it, just going in and saying ‘look, do one man at a time.'”

Okay, let’s be honest — is there anyone who wouldn’t want to read a book of Matthew McConaughey’s philosophies on life?