While many people have suggested the importance of setting goals, few explain how to synthesize them. How do multiple goals work together? Can they? How does a goal fit into the rest of what you need to do in life, since you can’t just exclusively work on the most important goal until complete? How do you switch between many different goals during any given day, when you can only do one thing at a time?
The answers to these questions are not terribly complicated, but they require the universality your life’s purpose alone provides. Other discussions on goals have to make a separation between different segments of life, such as work and home, because they lack a unifying context over which everything in your life can be ranked. The maximization of joy gives us that missing piece.
Purpose provides a practical way to handle having more than one goal at a time. When you pursue all aspects of your life for the same purpose, it becomes practical and even easy to rank goals applying to home, work, and every other facet of your life. Your purpose gives you a way to universally compare and connect each of these parts of your life, which makes it possible to mix and match different tasks from different goals based on the overarching progress in your purpose. A transcendent purpose provides the necessary power to prioritize all subordinate pieces of the model in a terrifically flexible manner.