My first goal was to fly around and explore the mod, see what it has to offer, and then make a plan on what I want to do there, like what ships and so on.
My second was to get a decent ship, a VHF. I only did missions for money, those huge trading ships looked to me like more time I was willing to invest. I wanted to have fun playing, not "working" so I can have fun later.
Then a faction asked me to join them, and my goals became to become better at fighting, get more money, and learn to RP.
Then my goal became to explore some other RP possibilities in other factions.
Then my goal became to develope RP that is entertaining, mostly to my self, and also other people. Pretty much all my chars are morons, and sometimes I RPed them so well that people thought I'm a moron. Oh well.
Then my goal became to help make some things better by posting on the forums, in particular things that I saw people stumble on over and over again and I asked myself why nobody made it better.
Now that I have some experience with the forums, my next goal will be to suck up to the right admins and mods, befriend them, make them take my word over anybody else's, rise to a position of power, and use it to destroy my enemies.