I would have started coding quicker and go into software development and leave the job I had.

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 it. 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.

I’d start taking my health seriously

I know the last five Superbowl winners, no prep required, so go back and gamble big. Also on political elections and any other major events I can recall with confidence. I bet US beating India in T20 cricket the other week could have made me a bundle.

Then that money goes into investments, don’t date the one dude who turned out to be a real POS, more firmly encourage my mom to get her heart checked out earlier, yada yada, basically the same everyone else is saying.

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, 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.

I could exploit the knowledge of my mistakes to do them all again but worse.

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.

I’d be sucking dicks for NVIDIA stock money.

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

Fuck me, have we had a bad decade

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.

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.

Bumping me back to 2014… I’d buy Nvidia stock and Gme stock… Bitcoin .

I’d then ditch the ex wife earlier… Get into a local scene earlier and enjoy my time till my baby momma / best friend / wife came along.

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.

Bitcoin

More time with family. Buy a ton of bitcoin for cheap. Give up smoking sooner.