This book intrigued me the moment I saw it. I’m not a huge self-help fan, but I have defended the genre before (link to Dayre post, although I might have to republish that here since Dayre is going to be gated soon). So I was interested in seeing what this book, where someone actually tries to live out the advice there.

Practically Perfect in Every Way is Jennifer Niesslein’s attempt to make her already good life even better. Through two years, she focuses on her home (cleaning), money (personal finance), marriage, kid (parenting), personal happiness, other people, health and fitness, and spirituality. She read a bunch of books and other material, from Fly Lady to How to Win Friends & Influence People to Smart Couples Finish Rich and actually tried the advice in there.

The first thing I noticed is that the book was dated. Normally, I don’t notice dates on books, but the first chapter was like woah. I had never heard of the self-help books here and I was a little surprised that Marie Kondo and Mrs Hinch weren’t included – that is, until I checked the publish date and realised that this was over ten years ago. It goes to show that the fortunes of self-help gurus – at least in the area of home improvement – will wax and wane over time.

So the thing about Niesslein starting from a pretty good place is that she doesn’t always put the advice into practice one hundred percent, even though that’s the premise of the book. While the cleaning section got a lot of implementation, it feels like she kind of skipped the parenting and spirituality sections. She did read the books and she thought about them, but I didn’t see a lot of advice being tested – in fact, the personal happiness section opens with her husband solving an interpersonal conflict problem her son had and that she didn’t manage to solve in the parenting one! In some ways, the book feels like a long review of many self-help books rather than a full-on experiment.

But then again, it might be a good thing that she didn’t dive head first into the experiment. Some of the practices sounded dubious, and after reading Pound Foolish, I’ve become a lot more wary of the personal finance self-help sector.

Apart from the lack of complete immersion into the experiment in some chapters, the only other thing about the book that I didn’t like was the chapter on spirituality. I get that everyone experiences spirituality differently, but the way she treated it felt a little glib. I suppose it’s because she doesn’t feel a need to improve herself there, but if that’s the case, then why not skip the chapter? It didn’t come across as very funny or entertaining for me.

Overall, this was a pretty interesting book. The books she followed might be a little dated, but some of the chapters were really funny. If you want to read this, I’d encourage you to just read the chapters that you’re interested in – Niesslein tries self-help one sub-genre at a time, but there’s no real need to read the preceding chapters if you’re only interested in the latter ones (although personally, I found the first two the most interesting).