Do I Plan Too Much?

For those of you who don't know me, I like to plan things.  I am only now starting to wonder if I plan a little too much...  I will let my millions of fans on the interweb be the judge.

Here are some beautiful examples of my planning..  I have one, five and ten year plans that include things such as getting a particular score on my GMAT and seeing a World Cup game in Brasil (I can spell it that way, thanks to Lia).  I have a pretty dang complicated financial model that estimates and tracks my income, cost of living, savings and investments going out only 5 years, since beyond that the variables are too unpredictable.  I also have my three target/dream careers, and all of my plans are working towards me one day realizing one of those.  Those three are Governor of FL/TN, a Managing Partner for a private equity group, or a really cool big time real estate developer.  The common theme between all of those careers is that they are all heavily dependent upon thinking and planning, which seems like a whole mess of fun.

My hobbies also coincidentally revolve around planning.  I have this strange desire to design systems, processes, houses and especially cities.  I even do research so that I can plan better.  Isn't that sick?  I have planned out what an intelligent version of healthcare reform would look like (intentional offense to anyone who thinks the one they passed was intelligent), I have formulated plans for reducing crime and poverty in cities, and I have even gone about designing entire cities from the ground up just to get an idea of what I think the perfect city would look like so that I could determine what are the most important factors to consider when planning to improve real cities.

A high level map I drew a while back is shown here:

And here is a street level drawing, complete with bike path along the water and unnecessarily robust mass transit:

So by now you are probably thinking that I am crazy and obsessive about this stuff, but here is my curve ball for you. Isn't it a good thing?  While people waste their lives watching shows about other people being filmed wasting their lives, I am working hard to solve all of the world's problems so that if I ever do get the opportunity to make things better, I'll be ready to pounce.

It's all part of the plan...

However, there is a severe unintended consequence of all of my thinking and planning.. and that is that Lia lives with me and has to deal with it all the time.  As difficult as it is for me to solve all of the world's problems on airplane napkins, it has to be even harder for her to listen to me talk about them all the time.  I am trying to get better about turning the thinking off.. So as a first step, did you see Jersey Shore last week?  They are so stupid...