Through whatever magical contrivance you wish to postulate, you are granted the opportunity to have either telepathic or telekinetic powers. It’s one or the other, not both, and precognitive powers are off the table.
If you take the telepathy option, you will be able to feel the emotions of anyone in the same room withh you with no more effort that you currently need to overhear an ordinary conversation; in fact, when you’re around many people at once, you may need to concentrate to block out their feelings, just as you may need to concentrate to read a book while in a crowded coffeehouse. You can probe the thoughts of one person at a time if you are willing to concentrate as hard as is required to, say, read a well-written technical manual for a new product of. Probing memories and the subconscious requires total concentration, say what you’d need to research, compose, and edit a technical paper; you need quiet and a lack of distractions, and a strong-willed subject can make it harder or even impossible by fighting you.
Alternatively, you can become telekinetic. Choosing this option doesn’t make you Jean Grey. Instead, you can affect any material object within your eyeline with the same amount of precision and force you’d be able to achieve with your bare hands. If you can left 200 pounds with both hands now, you can so telekinetically as long as the item is close enough for you to see it; likewise you can deliver an invisible blow from across the room as hard as you could do so if you were close enough to strike the item with physically. The smallest item you can affect is one you could manipulate with your fingernails, but you have more dexterity telekinetically.
Assuming you want to use your powers discreetly, which ability do you choose, and how do you use it for maximum return?
To heck with an invisible blow. How about less than a pound of pressure on a heart valve? Tiny vise grip on the carotid? A flip of needle into an eye? You don’t need strength just control. Be the greatist hitman ever.
But you could do the whole Vader choke someone to death thing.
I’d probably settle for a virtual knee to the crotch.
On the other hand, if it were a fem I found attractive… I don’t suppose I’m getting tactile feedback here, am I?
Some manipulations pretty much require some sort of feel of what’s happening. If I’m doing the annoying bug in the hair routine I’ll need to know that I’m actually disturbing the right region.
I’d practice rolling D&D dice. Let me explain why. There is a certain person with which I game who has a tendency to feel persecuted and overreact whenever something seems to be going wrong for them. So she’s irritating on a semi-regular basis. It’s probably going to happen at least once in a gaming session. You just don’t know when. Mostly we deal with it by telling her she’s doing it again, calm down and get over it.
One of the side things she does, I assume to make herself feel less anxious and keep her from going over the edge, is to make laughing put-downs. One of the put-downs she trots out, off and on, is “Yllaria can’t roll dice. She always gets bad rolls.” Which is stupid and irritating.
I want to pracitce rolling the dice until I’m able to go an a perfect streak right after she says that. I might even thank her for improving my luck. I don’t want to unbalance the game, I just want to see if she’d learn not to say it or if she’d react in a different way. Like, maybe, being unable to stop talking about my bad rolling skills.
Do you think five perfect rolls in a row would be too much? Three could be enough. Yeah. Three perfect rolls whenever she pops off about how I roll dice badly. I’m smiling just thinking about it.
Telepathy frankly sounds like too much of a hassle; especially if I can’t turn it off.
TK sounds much more useful. For maximum profit, I’d use it to become the greatest professional golfer in the world. Golf bores me to tears, but I’d muddle through somehow. If there’s more money in being a pool hustler, I’d go that route instead.
Either one would work in Vegas. Telepathy lets me know the dealer’s down card, telekinesis lets me manipulate dice. I could make a very comfortable living just moving from casino to casino, taking each for a couple of grand at a time. But TK is at my control, so I think I’d pick it.
ETA: For that matter, TK could let you warp the way the balls fall for the lottery drawings. Definitely TK. One big win and you’re set for life.
Not as described in the OP, since the object you’re manipulating has to be in your eyeline. When you’re watching the Powerball or Megamillions lottery drawing on television, you’re seeing an electronic image, not the actual balls.
Telepathy isn’t going to help you at blackjack. The dealer has to hit or stand on particular numbers, he doesn’t look at his down card until after the players have acted, and he doesn’t know what cards are next in the deck, so there’s no helpful information you can pick up.
Telepathy and poker would be a good start, or telekinesis and roulette.
Don’t take more than a couple grand from any given casino in any given month, go broke occasionally, get a friend to place some bets, go in disguise sometimes, don’t spend like crazy. With poker you wouldn’t be especially noticeable if you played reasonably well in low-limit games; after all, good poker players are good at reading other players, and you’d be an apparent expert at reading people and calling bluffs.
That’d be it, though I would probably choose Poker rather than Blackjack. Make sure you loose plausibly often, and you could make a more than decent living practically effortless.
Telekinesis. I would contract my services out to NASA, who would maintain discretion for me. In return, i would be the single greatest asset to manned spaceflight ever, for two reasons.
I could do spacewalks in a tenth of the time of normal astronauts, due to my TKs phenomenal dexterity when compared to those gloves. I also would not need to be tethered in any way, nor encumbered by the jet pack, since i could move myself around quite easily with TK.
I would also be a good reactionless drive for any mars mission they have planned. Sadly, my necessity to the mission would mean i probably wouldnt get to land, but i’d have a hell of a view from orbit.
The more I think about it, the more appeal TK has, even apart from the whole profit angle. Even if I never bothered to make a cent off it, it’d be so damn useful in everyday life. Even if you can only telekinetically lift as much as you could physically, you’d still be twice as strong as a normal human, because you can exert force with your mind and body at the same time! If you can lift your own weight, you could levitate by pushing against the ground! (Could you increase your max by “exercising” with your mind?) You could grab birds out of the sky! “Come here, little bird; I want to look at you for a moment.” PEEP! Seize fish from the rivers! Amaze friends and acquaintances with the sheer artistry of your paper airplane-making skills! Clean those difficult-to-reach areas! Smite evildoers! Pet monkeys!
Telepathy, on the other hand, would always let me know the truth of what other people are thinking about me. IT WOULD BE A LIVING HELL.