Skip to content
Desert Garden

How to Be Perfect

Written by the venerable Michael Schur, creator of Parks & Recreation and of course, The Good Place.

  • Morality is how we think we should behave on earth
  • Everything has an ethical undercurrent and everything we do affects somebody
  • Failure in trying to do the right thing is inevitable
    • But trying means we care
  • Virtue ethics - what makes a person good or bad?
  • Brilliant instructors and wise friends are very important
  • The Golden mean/goldilocks rule is that there is a spectrum that is like a see saw for virtues. If we veer to far towards one extreme, the see saw becomes imbalanced.
    • ex. Mildness is the golden mean of anger
    • Very challenging to define
  • An excess of a virtue can harm the people around you
  • If we don’t take stock of our virtues, we can find ourselves moving towards extremes and these aspects can “calcify.”
  • As you practice, it becomes effortless - Schur talks about how Steve Carrell & Amy Poehler were like that with their comedy
  • The closer we get to a golden mean, the easier it is to find others.
    • Examples include kindness and generosity
  • Religious zealots ignore cruelty as it is not a slight against god
  • Knowledge is how we escape cruelty

Quotes

Section titled “Quotes”

Footnotes

Section titled “Footnotes”

  1. Schur, Michael. How to Be Perfect: A Foolproof Guide to Making the Correct Moral Decision in Every Situation You Ever Encounter Anywhere on Earth, Forever. First Simon&Schuster hardcover edition, Simon & Schuster, 2022. ↩