Value of Planning and Insights to My Life

I am fortunate to still be walking and talking after many of my friends have passed away due to disease or blunt trauma.  The past year I have come to recognize influences of my behavior that I presumably would never have come to recognize if my life were over at an earlier time.  In the effort to plan what time I have left, I have discovered, again and again, how challenging it is for me to stick to the plan.

What I mean by "stick to the plan," is basically to continuously evaluate my plan for the good life against changing opportunities and circumstances.  When I was young I stuck to a plan simply because I had made the plan and I was going to follow it no matter what. This didn't turn out so well, and for a while I did very little planning outside of my job, fitness, and drinking beer.  After reading Aristotle's observation that the unplanned life isn't worth living, and overcoming my initial resistance to the idea, I decided to give planning another try. I did a little research by reading what others have to say about planning and execution and realized that I wasn't allowing myself enough flexibility to adjust the my plan as I and the world change.

Looking at all the things I want to do, and prioritizing them into what I most want at this point in my life made the truth that we are what we do very real for me.  By prioritizing my goals I saw that I had a desire to be someone different from who the goals I "like" to pursue where taking me toward.  The example being technical versus business, I enjoy solving technical problems, but I want to find the problems that have the best business payoff, e.g. a business man.  To satisfy my scientific technical desire I include a small amount of technology as a minor goal, but it is subordinate to finding the problems that have the best payoff in a business sense -- ultimately more satisfying to me in the long run.  (Look at the life of Tesla versus Edison or Westinghouse for examples.)

I have been a failure at executing my plans for the last year, but I have learned a huge amount about what motivates me and what makes the people around me special by the effort to plan and contemplation of my failures to carry out, or adjust the plan as circumstances open up to me.

Specific insights:

1. We are what we do. (Implicit in Aristotle's words "These virtues are formed in a man by his doing the actions".)
2. I am strongly motivated by the desire for approval from others. This was very hard to face, because it puts me in the category of a "second hander?"  If I have a choice between working a little harder or better for my clients vice spending some time getting my personal finances in order, I find myself doing the work for my clients.  The underlying motivation when I compare how I feel during both activities is that I imagine the clients appreciation for me when their product is early or better than expected. (Imagination is a powerful servant, but a terrible master. Clearly there are two kinds of imagination. -- TODO: need to research this idea about kinds of imagination, someone must have expounded it already.) 
3. The problem is that I am not making a decision according to my plan, I am making a decision based on feelings and whims of the moment. Using my plan I can take care of myself and my clients.
4. I have come to see that my feelings of anger have roots deep in my childhood. On reflection this moment of writing, the insight comes from expecting others to be like me, and feeling angry with them when they are not like me.  Only by looking at what others can contribute to the current project from a business (time, money and value) perspective did I come to see that others are not like me.  This had something to do with opening up my own memories of when I first had these kinds of feelings -- frustration with others leading to anger.  When my focus was purely technical I didn't care about others around me except to keep an eye out for people with technical skills that I wanted to learn.
5. A very old insight, but still felt as a "new" insight, is the struggle to follow a plan. Now I have the potential to witness the struggle in the moment vice retrospectively, but I keep forgetting to do it.  It is humiliating to "see" the slave I am to "false personality" and imagination. Rather than feel the humiliation I go instantly to "sleep" for hours on end.