It is difficult to underestimate how important our choice of goals is in maximizing how much joy we experience. Joy comes from enduringly experiencing what we value. Your goals will orient your daily action toward maximal long-term value as you work on them and mark your progress along the way as they are accomplished.
Defining what you want is vital for optimizing your actions. You can’t optimize without first defining what you want. It's all the more important to specify what you want in the ever-increasing complexity of the modern world. The more complex the circumstance, the less likely you are to get the best outcome without defining your intent, and the greater the difference will be between the best outcome and other outcomes.
What you want is not just a question of arbitrary feeling. It ought to be based on what you value, and by how much, both of which ought to be rationally determined and backed by solid reasons. If you really want to understand what you want and how much you want it, you’ll need to know why you want it.
An optimal goal will maximize your present joy given your circumstances and ensure your placement on the path to even greater joy. A suboptimal goal will vastly decrease the amount of joy you experience presently and, in the worst case, could also impose a hard limit on the joy you can obtain later.