When I was 19, I dove into the research chemical game head first. I cashed in every asset I owned to purchase a kilo of JWH-018. I set up a make-shift laboratory and re-branded the chemical under a well-known name, cold calling convenience stores and headshops to ship out samples. It was good money for the longest time, it highly varied between $4000-5000 profit every week. Since I live in a small metropolitan area(50,000 people) I was conveniently the only person in town that had the new "legal" blends every time the banhammer came down, so my local market was thriving also.
I'm 22 years old and out of the game now, although I developed a load of connections and too much knowledge about how beautifully terrifying this entire world is.
I managed to save up about $20,000 and dump it into advertising for my recently formed SEO/Web Design firm. The beautiful thing is that I used to sell to a lot of high-level oil rig operators who have since moved into administrative positions and have gotten me many WELL-PAYING jobs in the energy sector doing web development. With SEO contracts I'm making a solid $8,000 per month and an extra $2,000 to $10,000 every time a site launches. It's unbelievable how perfect everything is falling together. We're about to begin on a start-up with funding from a very well-known petroleum company with potential payouts that will absolutely shatter my perception of reality.
Now maybe its all the research chemicals I guinea pigged, or my enormous amount of energy, but I feel like the only thing you can do on this miserable spinning rock is to follow your dreams until they run you into the ground. It doesn't matter how grand or ridiculous they are, just do it. Capitalism isn't dead, its just hiding in the niches.