What would YOU do…?

I watched Hot Tub Time Machine with the missus last night. It was better than I initially thought it was going to be, with a fun ending that probably saved the entire movie.

But it got me thinking, if I went back to 1986 in my younger body but with all the knowledge I have now what would I do to get rich?

What would you do…?

Now the easy answer is to say ‘Invent Google‘ or something similar. But do you actually believe you have the knowledge to invent a revolutionary way of creating a more accurate and faster search engine? Me neither.

Same with YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, iMDb, Skype. Even Hotmail (which Microsoft bought from one guy for a bazillion dollars).

You could buy domain names that would become popular later on, but the above websites hadn’t been created yet, so who’s to say they wouldn’t have just released them under different names. I’m sure a video submission site would have been just as popular if it was called MeTube. Sure you could buy company website before they do then sell them on for ridiculous amounts. But McDonalds successfully sued some poor Joe who snaffled mcdonalds.com before they did, so maybe that wouldn’t work either.

Maybe you could do betting. But do you know the intricate details of any sporting event accurately enough in the late 80′s/early 90′s to be able to make such a bet with excellent odds? Plus you’d have to get a hell of a lot of money together to make any bet really worth while. Also if you’re the same age as me you’d be early teens or pre-puberty in 1986; far too young to have any kind of proper money or even to walk into a betting shop in the first place.

You could become a songwriter. Just nick any of the following songs: I’d Do It For You by Bryan Adams, My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion, Shine by Take That, Can’t Get You Out of my Head by Kylie. Like them or hate them you could make a mint.

But are you a good enough composer to make them the smash hit that the originals were. You couldn’t just walk into a studio and start singing ‘With the lights down, it’s less dangerous…‘, they’d want the whole song recorded first.

Plus did you actually know any heavyweight contacts in the music industry in the late 80′s to get your music noticed? For most people that’s a nope and another nope.

Same with movie drafts/proposals.

Perhaps patents could be the way to go. You could possibly patent SMS or touch screen on phones; maybe even the entire way the iPhone OS works with the swiping and accelerometer and whatnot. But would you really be good enough to make it watertight?

So you see, it’s not actually as easy as you think, even with all the knowledge of the next 24 years in your head you’d still need some serious skills to put them into action.

The only thing you’d have for definite would be predictions, but who’d seriously listen to a young teenager about future concepts.

Anything I haven’t thought of?