By telling you these things, I run the risk of providing you too much information. Which might cause you to do things a little bit too differently, which, if you’re not careful might cause increasingly greater ripples upon society and change history as I knew it. Butterfly effect and all that. Which would stilll be okay. But it might end up invalidating some of the other information I’ll be giving you, leaving you forever puzzled and when you’re on your death bed you’d be all, “what the fuck did he mean by “bet huge sums of money on Manny Pacquiao fights” who the hell is Manny Pacquiao?”

Well, that’s tip number one. When you need capital, bet huge sums of money on Manny Pacquiao fights. He’s going to be this Filipino boxer and you can probably get rich off bets made on his fights, specially during the early days when he was still a betting underdog and he started fighting much bigger guys. So, that’s for your quick source of money.

The next thing I want to tell you is to invent Facebook. You don’t have to call it exactly that. But listen, here’s what it is: the way for you to become a multi-billionaire. By the time you’re about 18, a huge portion of the world’s households would have about one computer each. You might not have heard of this word before, “Internet”, that’s kind of a system where most computers in these houses would be linked with each other. As soon as you can get to a libray, read up all you can on what this word means, its history. What’s going to happen is it’s going to play a huge part in how most people would be living their lives. I don’t mean anything like people are going to be inside this “Internet” like in some sort of Virtual Reality environment, although that might happen too, in my–our –future. But businesses, governments, and people would be doing their official and leisure transactions on this Internet.

So, Facebook. It’s hard to explain but each person would have their own page on this Facebook. They put up their pictures on it, video, music, whatever else they might want to. They basically share information about themselves to other people who could simply use their own computers to view other people’s pages. They can send messages to each other, broadcast to a virtually unlimited number of people news about themselves like, “ hey this person and I are now boyfriend-girlfriend” and other people would be all, “wow, that’s great!” If you find this weird, don’t worry, usually it’s just the people who they know “In Real Life” like family, friends, classmates, who can read these things. What’s going to happen is, this Facebook, this Social Network would end up having billions of members in it each wanting to use the service to communicate with their friends or to basically just exist in this thing called the Internet.

What I hope you would do is invent this Facebook that I speak of. No, I certainly didn’t invent it, I’m just a Facebook user as well. But if by, say, 1998, you already know things like computer programming and how to create pages for the “World Wide Web,” and the knowledge of how utterly world-changing social networks will become, you’ll have all you’ll need to invent your own Facebook. Precursors to Facebook with names like Friendster and Multiply would already be arriving very soon at that point so you better be quick and start writing the code.

Oh, yeah, you still have to make it cool and trendy so people would want to create a page for themselves in this system and then afterwards recommend it to their own friends. That’s what we in this time call “viral,” because it spreads like a virus. So, you have to always have some knowledge of what other people think is cool at any given point. Which brings me to my next point. As early as now, you also have to work on your social skills. Not that the nerd who invented Facebook in my reality had great social skills, but he did have other people helping him out.

Let’s not put all our eggs in one basket. So, if you don’t end up inventing Facebook here are some other tips for you. Search engines are probably an even bigger thing than Facebook. Look them up in the school library and magazines about computers. See if you’d like to work on search engines instead. You have about five years before Google comes into existence.

There’s this thing called Twitter. People type short status messages on twitter on the Internet and say things like, “Got home at 5. Ate a chicken sandwich. Yum.” But the catch is, they only have about 140 characters to use on these messages. I don’t really know how that one becomes big, but it does. Try to invent Twitter.

So, that’d be about it for my professional advice for you. What you do with that knowledge is pretty much up to you. I’m also going to give you some reassurance. I’m from 2011. You can be 100% certain that at least up to my present time, you won’t get crushed underneath a building due to an earthquake or anything like that. Well, as long as you’re anywhere in Metro Manila. So yes, you can follow your dreams and live in some high-rise building with a view or something like that without needing to buy a parachute.