If you could go back in time and re-educate yourself, what would your lesson plan look like?<p>I'm going to assume plenty of you 'financially fit' happy hackers will simply opt-out of this experiment altogether because pre-optimization is the root of all evil, and if you're content enough with what you've done and contributed to then there really isn't much to fix, right? Don't fix <i>it</i> (your younger and more incompetent self, or X) if <i>it</i> (the difference between your current level of competence and X) ain't broken?<p>Your lesson plan doesn't have to pertain to programming or coding, but it should instead refactor some negative or inefficient pattern of thinking. I am going to apply one constraint though, you must assume your former self has transcended the stage of incompetence of <i>not knowing they don't know</i>; so IOW, your former self is in complete submission to your authority since they realize what they want and <i>know that they don't know</i> what you have, which should essentially alter what your younger self will become, more efficient, better than you.<p>My original intention, of what started as a simple query trolling CS and EE types who have a lot of experience developing system at the level. Trolling or not, I really just wanted to induce some reflective discourse, insights, and words of wisdom to become more competent writing on a level I'm unfamiliar with. Instead I ended up with this very detailed, verbose, hypothetical, thought-experiment, which started to remind me, half-way through, of an xkcd comic on learning to program.