I Wish I Knew This 20 Years Ago: One Idea Worth the Read

Why I picked it up

Justin Perry runs a YouTube channel called You Are Creators, and this is his first book. You can tell. It's small, thin, printed in a weird font that doesn't even fill the page, and there are no page numbers anywhere in it — I've genuinely never read a book without page numbers. None of that is a knock. It just tells you what you're getting: a guy who had things to say and put them out there without a big publishing machine behind him.

The book covers a lot of ground for something this short — fear, passion, near-death experiences, creating happiness, being childlike, moderation, creativity. It's not a life-stages book like the one sitting next to it on my shelf, the one that tells you what to do as a teenager versus what to do by 35. This is just straight life lessons, one after another.

The one idea that actually stuck

There's a single sentence in there about string theory. That's it — one sentence. And it sent me down a rabbit hole researching string theory and multiple dimensions for the rest of the week. The rough idea: you've got two competing theories of how the universe works, Einstein's gravity-based model and string theory, and string theory is the one trying to stitch the two together across multiple dimensions.

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What Perry does with that is the part that got me. He points out that in a multi-dimensional framework, there's potentially a version of you living right now — same path, same choices, same everything — except that version is broke. And another version of you, same exact life, except that version is the richest person in the city. Same person, same starting point, different outcome depending on the dimension you're tuned into.

I apply that as a gut check more than a literal belief. When I catch myself getting comfortable or coasting on a deal, I think about the version of me on the other side of that same decision — the one who pushed the extra call, closed the extra unit, didn't leave the room until the number worked. It's a cleaner way of asking "am I playing this the way the richest version of me would play it" than most of the visualization language I've read elsewhere.

It's a review book, and that's fine

Here's my honest take: if you've read Jack Canfield's Success Principles, or anything solid on visualization and affirmations, you've basically already read this book. There's not much new here. But that's not automatically a strike against it. I look at it as a good review book — the kind where you're nodding along going "yeah, yeah, I knew that," except you'd genuinely forgotten half of it because you've read so many books since. The string theory angle and the parallel-dimension version of yourself were new enough to me that the refresher paid for itself.

Perry also name-checks the kind of territory Alan Watts covers, and if you've done any Landmark-style work, some of this will feel familiar too. He's not claiming to have invented any of it. He's just packaging it.

Who should actually read this

I'm giving it a 4 out of 5, with a real caveat on who it's for. If you're new to self-development, or moderately into it, pick this up — it's a solid, fast on-ramp. If you're advanced, if you're already teaching this stuff, if your mornings are dialed in and your job and your relationship are in a good place, skip it. It won't tell you anything you don't already know.

I'm still on the journey myself, always looking for the next thing that reframes how I operate, and the string theory bit did that for me this time. That's the whole value of this book in one sentence — you get one nugget, and for me, that nugget was worth it.

Next up on my list: The ABCs of Success by Bob Proctor, who I respect a lot. That review is coming.