Elsewhere I have argued on the importance of having a central purpose. To refresh your recollection, “a central purpose is the long-range goal that constitutes the primary claimant on a man’s time, energy, and resources.” (Leonard Peikoff, OPAR). Recently I’ve been chewing how a central purpose makes you happier, and I thought I’d share my current perspective on that.

1. A central purpose can transform routine work into a rich source of values

A long-range goal makes the difference in whether productive work provides spiritual fuel or not. If you are just trading time for money, one day is very much like another and you will be bored soon. A bored person is not a happy person. In contrast, if you see that you can pursue your long-range goal while fulfilling your day-to-day responsibilities, routine work becomes much more rewarding.

For example, an old friend of mine went into his first engineering job knowing that eventually he wanted to start his own business. He saw his work as an engineer as part of the training he needed. He figured that he needed technical, managerial, and sales experience before he would be ready to start a business. This gave him an added motive to solve problems as an engineer. Some engineers burn out from always fighting the latest fire, but he was also proactively looking for how to eliminate fires — because he wanted to run his business differently. That kept the problems endlessly fascinating to him.

Similarly, someone with a “day job” as a waiter or waitress could use that “people time” for some purposeful end. An actor could practice stage presence. An out-of-work manager could practice negotiation, mediation or networking skills. There is always a way to get some value out of interactions with other people.

If you view work as “punching the clock” to get money, it may fill your stomach, but it will not fill your soul. But you can make any honest work into soul-nourishing activity by linking it to your central purpose.

2. A central purpose is essential to reducing internal conflict

The opposite of happiness is suffering; the commonest source of suffering is internal conflict. You feel conflict when you are pulled in two directions and either you don’t want to decide or you can’t decide which direction to go. This is particularly problematic for people who have a “flat” value-hierarchy, meaning all of their values are of similar importance.

In the 21st century, there are unlimited numbers of values you could act to gain or keep; choosing is a necessity for happiness. If you let yourself get paralyzed by the options, you don’t gain many values, they don’t get that strong, and you get only some modest pleasure from gaining them. You need strong values to experience great joy.

When you choose a central purpose, you create a standard for prioritizing your values. This makes it easier to choose between them. Since you choose to direct more energy in one direction, those values also get stronger. As a result, you get more and more intense joy as you gain and keep them. The #1 way to reduce conflict and form stronger values is to pursue a central purpose.

For example, some people are “pack rats.” They have too much stuff to fit into their homes, and more projects going than they’ll ever complete in their lifetimes. They keep starting new projects, but then they get distracted by some other project, so not much gets finished. Projects are left in the indeterminate state with an expectation to get back to them someday. This is not conducive to happiness.

If you are in this state, you need some way to get some momentum. I’ve seen adopting a central purpose make a difference. By identifying an important long-term goal and deciding it’s worth making it the “primary claimant” of your time, you change your perspective on every other project. It becomes easier to prioritize, easier to let go of the lesser values, easier to stay focused on one thing. One person I know commented to me that she became motivated to clear out her house — after years — because she was engrossed in her new central purpose and didn’t want to waste time looking for things!

3. A central purpose adds deep meaning to your life

Another contributor to happiness is having meaning in your life.

Sometimes people get deep meaning from their relationships. Just the other day, my Uber driver told me how he was changed forever when he held his first child. Victor Frankl reported that one of the things that kept some people alive in the Nazi concentration camps was fighting for the survival of a loved one. But what happens when the person who adds so much meaning to your life passes away? Such a person is an irreplaceable value. It is not realistic to think you will find another such a person.

Sometimes you can find meaning in your life by following a visionary leader. This was the case in my original career as an engineer. I had the privilege of working with a man named Bob Fugate. He ran the first field experiments in ground-based laser guidestar adaptive optics. It was thrilling to be on the team that showed this theoretical idea could work in practice. With Bob’s leadership and a lot of hard work and creative problem solving by us, we did something that had never been done before.

But I found that when the project evolved into working on precision and reliability in the system, I was not as motivated. The work was still long-range and had clear priorities, but it wasn’t meaningful to me.

The only source of meaning for your life that is entirely under your volitional control is your central purpose. It is your choice of what you want to create with your life. It is your vision of the future that you commit to. With a central purpose, you decide what would be meaningful. That it’s your long-range goal can make the journey itself become meaningful.

If you are not as happy as you’d like, committing or recommitting to a central purpose is the most effective way to shift the status quo. Setting a central purpose doesn’t require being “called,” making a full-time or permanent commitment, or breaking from your present work. I have coached many people in setting a central purpose during Launch, and the vast majority were able to identify a direction and move forward within the 8 weeks.

Setting a central purpose is directly within your own agency, which means you can choose it as the means to add joy, reduce conflict, and make everything you do more meaningful.