.......you guys realize that you're both overthinking it. Maga books won't make you rich. They don't buy books. They BURN books. If anything, you release a book with Obamas face on it, and the title of the book is "Very Burnable". The pages don't even need text. Just a thick wad of paper, Obamas face on the cover, with the text "Very Burnable".
Probably a several-way bet on trump winning a presidency, suggesting everyone inject themselves with bleach and then staging a coup, Britain shitting the bed, deciding to leave the EU, manifesting £60bn of debt and shocking the Queen to death, Russian war in Europe, a global pandemic killing millions getting turned into political football, the Taliban taking over Afghanistan again, several of the big names in 2016 dying, a trend of people wanting to eat laundry capsules & idk Alec Baldwin shooting someone.
I reckon a quid on that would net me enough to buy an island with a mansion on it
Plot twist, your crazy bet goes viral (no pun intended) and the guy who dropped the test tube in Wuhan was late to work that day because he was watching a video about it. No pandemic occurs, Trump fades into obscurity, and a small company working on climate change solutions makes an incredible finding and fixes the planet because they didn't have to go bankrupt during COVID.
I'd wait a couple of years and talk my ex-husband into keeping our house and renting it instead of selling it when we split up. It made sense at the time, since selling it was the fastest way to pay off all of our mutual debt (and most of our individual debt, too) and make it an easy split, but if we'd waited a few years, we would've made a solid 6 figure profit. I have no desire to be a landlord and mostly I'm glad we sold it to a nice family for what was still an affordable amount, but it would've been the only way I could ever afford to buy anything else on a single income, and it would've set him and his new wife up a lot better. I kind of hate the idea morally, but from a purely pragmatic view, it would've made sense.
PPE and Vaccine maker stocks, it'll be 5 years to get the initial capital but once I've got it together, those are gonna explode in value on me.
I'd hesitate to switch my college of choice for the friends I'd lose out on, but if I did I would know where I'd try extra hard to get in instead. Def reconsidering the major I study though, the one I went with was sold to me as one of the best and turned out to be fucking useless trying to find any work.
Nothing. No money for investments then or now, which is also why I never kept up enough with stocks, crypto etc. to be able to cheat the market as a one-time time traveller. Plus I have several medical issues (then and now) that remain unsolved mysteries.
Only thing I can think of is using a bigger boot partition when I installed reinstalled Ubuntu from scratch about 5 years ago.
It's mostly just a recent issue that popped up. I'm currently running Ubuntu 20.04 (i.e. version from 2020, there have been two major releases since then) and since I use LUKS, resizing the boot partition is going to be fairly complicated, if I can figure it out at all.
Realistically, I would grieve the loss of my children, who would never be born if I didn't line things up just right to cause them to happen again. I'd spend more time with my parents, who are getting along in the years, and I'd make the most of my time with them while they're healthy and happy.
There are a few specifics where I'd try to get some loved ones out of trouble before some critical tipping point that would later cause a bunch of heartache and stress.
There are general things about money and politics I'd probably do differently, knowing about how stocks have performed and what not, but that's not super interesting to me, because I'm mostly content in my personal life (including my career) and wouldn't want to upset that balance by doing anything too different from what brought me here.
If my previous consciousness coexisted: Support my young shitbrain self in the tough times he's going through and become the best supporter anyone could ever want...or maybe that already happened and that's why I'm constantly being sidetracked.
I'm doing this from memory to stay in the spirit of the question. I'd buy ethereum, then pivot to zoom in early 2020, pivot back to etherum mid 2020, then finally to NVIDIA at the end of 2022. I'll look up how well my memory works have served me.
OK, I did the math. I could turn $1K into $74M in 10 years with that strategy. I lost a year of growth because I thought Ethereum was released in 2013 however it was the white paper that was released in 2013, the coin started public trading in August 2015. Either way, I'd still be happy with that return.
2014-06-19 twiddle my thumbs because Ethereum hasn't been released yet
2015-08-01 $1.00 = 3.22ETH
2020-01-02 3.22ETH = $421.24 = 6.12 ZOOM shares (also buy toilet paper and n95 masks)
I would start drinking coffee a lot sooner. I've found that it has a remarkable effect on my cognitive ability (supposedly a common thing amongst ADHDers), and in 2014, I'd have benefitted massively from that.
Besides the obvious monetary stuff, I'd be going into my second year of university knowing that I am autistic and having learned a lot of the social skills and coping strategies that I learned from therapy. I'd probably be able to find a fulfilling relationship before I turned 20 (rather than 28), and I would have felt far more comfortable joining up with clubs and groups at school and developing a social network.
I often feel bad that I only started getting help with those aspects of myself within the last couple of years. But I wasn't aware that I was autistic.
2011/12~ ish my wife said "we should build a computer to mine crypto" my answer was "that is dumb, how can some digital ones and zeros be worth any actual cash, it seems like a waste of money to spend thousands on a computer with multiple gpus for something that will never pay for itself."
A couple weeks later I regretted my answer because I could have had a SICK gaming computer. A decade later I regretted it for other reasons and decided to start letting my wife make all the financial decisions.
Do better than I did with Bitcoin (sold it waaaaaay before it became money), Do better with GME etc., idk, probably little things here and there if I can remember them. Try to get the good ending.
One thing I'm learning from these types of questions is that knowledge isn't power, money is. There is precious little I could do with future knolewedge outside of personal/family matters without first using that knowledge to make as much money as possible.
I would buy stock in various companies such as NVIDIA, GME, AMC, etc. Bet on political events such as Obama getting to appoint a Supreme Court justice who doesn't confirmed, how Trump announces his presidency, Trump winning the presidency, January 6, and Harris being Biden's running mate, Harris telling Biden "We did it, Joe", and Biden winning the Presidency. Can't forget Pence's fly friend during the debate.
I would give it another go with my ex since I would be aware of the issues that developed. If it doesn't work again, that would be a major mind fuck.
Getting in business with my current business partner, wouldn't have such a rough start since I still have the skills and knowledge from running a business.
First I wouldn't buy my Mustang, I'd rebuild my Jeep and stick to Offroading instead of racecars wayyy cheaper over time. Then I wouldnt get out of the Army because the real world sucks, from there everything I know now wouldn't have happened and I probably wouldn't even live in the State I live in now
If it were maybe 15 years, I could very quickly identify some changes that would easily change the entire trajectory of my life.
At 10 years, it's hard to say since by today's perspective, I've had my life in reasonable order and heading in the right direction for the past decade. So there aren't a lot of options to make different choices I'm certain would help me gain things personally. That being said:
I would make a more concerted effort to leave the job I had in 2014. It was a regrettable decision to stay as long as I did and a very toxic work environment for me. I could have made more money almost anywhere else and by that point I had met all the important and amazing people that worked there during my reign, so I wouldn't have missed out on those friendships.
I do have much better employment skills than I had 10 years ago and most of what I know and do would still apply back then, so I guess I could make use of that to climb the ladder a bit faster and/or earn more money sooner in my career.
I suppose one day to day "exploit" would be that I'd know in advance if any specific purchase was a good decision or not. For instance, I'd know that the car I was going to buy ended up being a fantastic choice or that the piece of crap bookshelf was only going to last me a year before it started to disintegrate at which point I would have to replace it. This could be useful for saving money, since at the very least I could avoid purchasing the stuff that I know would not last or live up to expectations.
I did not have a lot of money back then and certainly not enough to make good use of any stock market foreknowledge from today turn into a big payday. I don't keep up with lottery numbers. I'm not a sports person, so I wouldn't / couldn't make any money off that kind of betting.
If I were motivated enough, I might try to teach myself some music / music production skills and then start releasing my own version of popular songs from the future that haven't been released yet. Maybe I'd luck out and end up with a lucrative music career! Or similarly, I might try to figure out the patenting process and then start patenting ideas for stuff that had not yet been invented, then do my best to become a bit of a patent troll.
There's a slim chance I could save the lives of some relatives, but honestly that's hard to know. I had one family member die suddenly of a heart attack and another that died of an accidental drug overdose. I also had a friend that ignored people's advice to go see a doctor and ended up the problem she was having was cancer, which she passed away from. Apparently, one of her doctors even told the family that if she had gotten treatment a little sooner, things could have turned out quite differently. We'd been telling her to go for at least a year, but if I could go back I would try a lot harder and be more persistent.
I'd tell myself not to waste the time, money or energy on college.
I'm not against it in general, but going for a compsci degree when you've already gotten software dev work is definitely a waste of time unless your employer is paying for it. I just let my dad talk me into it after getting out of a bad job. Thankfully I only wasted one semester on it and got out because I found another job.
Still, that turned out to be $4k in loans for just 6 units because I couldn't file my FAFSA in time to qualify for any grants, thanks to my fucking undiagnosed ADHD father who couldn't be bothered to file his taxes or even give me an accurate income required by the form. That was $4k I could have put into savings or invested instead.
It's a troll toll. It'll get you a software engineering job with a roman numeral in the title at a company you've actually heard of. But if you're almost done then there's no reason not to stick with it.
The early years of my career were quite a slog, having taught myself to program. I started out on freelancing websites, competing with devs from the third world who worked for pennies a day. I lucked into my first salaried job, got hired through my cousin.
I will say, having some theory knowledge does come in handy occasionally. You might never have to write your own hashtable, but being able to understand the implementation of the structures you're using helps a lot to make informed decisions about how you organize and access data, especially when you're trying to optimize for performance or memory usage.
One piece of unsolicited advice you might have heard before is to not discount the power of networking. The best written cover letter in the world can't hold a candle to knowing someone who can put in a good word. Make friends with your professors and classmates, you never know who might think to look you up one day when their company is hiring. My old boss still offers me a job occasionally, more than five years later.
I'd probably just shoot my younger self. It's not suicide when it's murder. Or something. Anyway obliterating the universe with a paradox would definitely be a better result than the hell we're currently living in.
Win the lotto for me and a buddy then toss some into investments and properties to sell/rent at a discounted rate following 2019 in comparison to those who inflated theirs. Instead of 2k/m I'll go $1,500 as long as it's still above the profit line I don't need hoards of wealth from it I kinda enjoy working.
Also I'd probably just dump a bunch of money into my kids name to let it start building interest for them.
I'd rather take two more hours to collect some data from the stock markets, and how they went up and down after our beloved lunatic CEO's bigmouth accidents.