In the first round your real goal is to acquire as much property and intel as you can. It's also a good time to be feeling out who make good allies or enemies. You have your 3 stats which will govern how you tend to be best at prosecuting acquisitions... if you have a high military and low intelligence, for instance, you probably want to be looking for someone with a high intelligence who will sell you information on good military targets. A high Diplomacy score means you should be looking for alliances - either to join or to sabotage. The original rules, and I think FT has managed to preserve them pretty well and streamline them a bit too, were designed around the idea that no action a nation state might consider pursuing shouldn't have an action of that sort here. So you can blockade someone, you can assassinate someone, you can bribe someone and so on.

As the game progresses you will begin to have goals you develop on your own, because victory points in the game are something of a 'everyone can win' option. Your core goal is to improve the wealth, standing, and power of your House, against a backdrop of Crises, other houses, and so on. If you are more powerful at the end of the game then you were to start, you have basically won. But within a few rounds you will have your own personal goals, like teaching the bastard who raided your mining facility not to screw with you.

In round 1 though, things are mostly a blank slate, your goal really is just more wealth and power. This is modified a bit by having some assigned 'personal goals', like assassinating someone, or owning four mines, or raiding 3 separate players. If you achieve them then they are disproportionately valuable to you then owning four mines normally would be. They help to tilt you towards certain routes to power but you can ignore them or achieve them as an aside.

Generally speaking, your pre-selected goals are going to match up well to pursuing certain of the principle end game goals, like 'Call Down MULE: Own the most Mining Facilities of any player' and 'own 4 mining facilities', if you got the latter, it makes sense to pursue the former. However your route for pursuing that can be to just trying to buy as many as possible, or to try to get them from other players who you think might be seeking the same final goal of most mines, buying one mine when you both have 8 makes you 9-8, taking one of his makes you 9-7, better edge. But you could try for an outright military assualt, or you could try to peacefully buy it from him, or you could try to coerce him into selling it to you at a cheaper price by threat of attack, or you could talk a more militarily tough player into seizing it, either because you don't think that guy has many mines himself so it doesn't matter to you, or because you think he'd be willing to sell it at a good price to you. Alternatively, if you have your 4 mines goal, the equally valuable 'Fog of War: Own the most Vespene Refineries of any player.' isn't a vary logical one for you to pursue because you need to get the most Vespene while still going for the mines.

Most of the initial semi-random goals are fairly easy to meet over the course of a game, they're supposed to be, and really just exist to make the slate a little less blank... they bias you toward certain routes to power. However if you luck out and acquire all 4 of the common mines this round, and already had 2, even if your personal goal was 4 vespene and not 4 mines, you might want to aim for 'most mines' and treat vespene as a goal to achieve if circumstances permit but not a priority.

Essentially the game is loose rules for permitting an open-flow game. You can pretty much follow whatever path you want to, and with 7 players one player can alter the game mechanics massively. If I say, right now, 'I will attack any house that uses assassination, on me or anyone' then the other 6 players have to decide if they want to risk that. Same, a clever player might deliberately botch a job and make it look like a militarily powerful player did it so I end up grinding our forces to oblivion and leaving us both weak against raids, seizures, etc. Then we might find out and launch a concerted campaign on the framer, or be so weakened we feel we must ally or both be obliterated. The game will simply present opportunities (crises, same thing) and that will influence your game play. The rules exist simply to give a structure to that.