Building a life strategy

This isn't a manual for how to do it because I don't have one.  It is a personal conversation (or brain dump) about the process and how I get things together.

I've always believed that goals are important.  I've been taught this and once you understand the idea it seems obvious - how can you be happy if you don't know what you want?  Maybe it's right, maybe not.  Do you have to know the answer to this question to move forward?  I typically think there are few things that you really must have 100% nailed down before you can do other useful things, but maybe this is one of them.

In my attempts to find my happy, I usually think in a diagram and I start on the right with HAPPY.

Inevitably, this leads upstream really really far.  Each of the 'happy with' bubbles does this:

You can see that if these are drawn together, it quickly becomes an unmanageable level of bubbles.  I already didn't draw all of them.  How to make sense of so much stuff and boil it down into simple actions?