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How to Be Perfect
Michael Schur
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What is How to Be Perfect about?
Mike Schur, creator of The Good Place, makes 2,400 years of moral philosophy genuinely fun and surprisingly useful. From Aristotle and Kant to contemporary ethics, learn how to think through the everyday choices that define a good life, with humor, honesty, and zero pretension.
Key ideas of How to Be Perfect
Virtue as Daily Practice
Aristotle's golden mean shows that good character is built through repeated small choices, not innate talent or one-time heroic acts.
No Single Ethical Theory Is Enough
Utilitarianism, Kantian duty, and contractualism each expose real moral truths but break down when applied alone to complex everyday situations.
Staying Awake to Your Own Choices
Most everyday harm comes from moral sleepwalking, and the antidote is a handful of honest questions asked before and after each decision.
Read an excerpt from the summary
How to Be Perfect — summary
The day you tried to be a good person and failed
Picture this. You wake up one morning and decide today is the day you stop being a vaguely okay person and start being an actual good one. You pick up the litter outside your apartment. You buy cage-free eggs because the carton has a smiling chicken on it. You skip the burger and order the salad. You help an old lady cross the street. That night you watch a serious documentary on a streaming platform and feel virtuous enough to fall asleep in your sneakers.
Then a Universe Goodness Accountant shows up with a clipboard. Your coffee cup is now drifting toward the great Pacific garbage patch. The cage-free label, it turns out, has almost no legal meaning, and your sneakers were stitched together by underpaid teenagers who did not get a salad for lunch. The streaming platform funnels profits into a defense contractor that sells drones to a dictatorship. The documentary director is, separately, a creep. Oh, and the old lady you helped across the street? She was on her way to a Nazi memorabilia auction. The accountant tallies it up. You owe the universe a refund.
That is the joke that opens Michael Schur's *How to Be Perfect*, and it is also the entire problem of being alive in a complicated world. Schur, the writer who built *The Good Place*, *Parks and Recreation*, and *Brooklyn Nine-Nine*, spent years trying to figure out what made a fictional person "good" enough for heaven. He ended up in a long argument with three thousand years of moral philosophy, and this book is the cheerful, profane, slightly anxious tour he wants to take you on.
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Continue in the appWho is it for?
- Anyone who wants to understand moral philosophy without wading through dense academic texts.
- Anyone who feels paralyzed by the gap between wanting to be good and actually living that way.
- Anyone who enjoys pop culture references, humor, and real-life dilemmas alongside serious ideas.
- Anyone who thinks ethics is too abstract to be useful in ordinary, daily decisions.
About the author: Michael Schur
Michael Schur is an American television writer and producer best known for creating and running shows including The Good Place, Parks and Recreation, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. His work on The Good Place required years of research into moral philosophy, which became the direct foundation for this book.
In How to Be Perfect, Schur translates Aristotle, Kant, Bentham, Mill, and contemporary philosophers like T.M. Scanlon into language that working adults can actually use, drawing on the same comedic instincts that shaped his television writing.
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