Shohei Ohtani used this goal-setting method when he was a freshman in high school

This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.

During Shohei Ohtani’s first two years at Hanamaki Higashi High School in Japan, his baseball coach, Hiroshi Sasaki, introduced him to the Harada Method.

Years earlier, Sasaki had studied under Takashi Harada, a renowned track and field coach who developed a goal-setting system to help his athletes find motivation. He built it around an idea: Lofty goals could be achieved by breaking them down into daily, repeatable habits.

Sasaki saw something in Ohtani that matched the system’s intention: a high schooler with the unusual ambition of becoming a No. 1 professional draft pick in Japan. So he introduced the method as a potential structuring device, and Ohtani took it.

As Ohtani transformed into a global superstar, the Harada Method spread beyond high school baseball fields. It has been featured in documentaries, explored in articles and became the subject of a Harvard Business School case study.

Arguably the greatest player in baseball, Ohtani is on his way to capturing a fourth consecutive MVP award and his fifth in six years. But the beauty of the Harada Method is that it’s not exclusive to talented athletes or even sports.

At its essence, the method involves taking one goal, writing it down, then deconstructing it into 64 smaller habits and actions to achieve that goal.

Ohtani, for example, drew a single square in the center of a piece of paper and wrote his goal of becoming the top draft pick inside it. Around that, he drew eight more squares, each one filled with one skill that he believed a No. 1 draft pick would need to master: control, physical conditioning, sharpness, pitching speed, mental strength, trickery, character and karma.

When Shohei Ohtani was a high school freshman, he created a detailed “dream sheet” with one central goal: to be the #1 draft pick for 8 NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) teams.

It was a 64-cell roadmap based on a framework called the Harada Method.

Here’s exactly what Shohei… https://t.co/bMuZ5w3wRX pic.twitter.com/lJBaOZLkgM

— Arpan Gupta (@arpangup) November 14, 2025

When Frances Frei, a Harvard professor, stumbled across Ohtani’s goal sheet on social media, she was inspired to learn more. In her eyes, the chart transformed his journey from an interesting sports story into a practical leadership tool.

At Harvard, Frei researches how leaders can accelerate performance. She also played college basketball and thought she would one day become a coach. When she read Ohtani’s goals, her two worlds collided, and she wanted to better understand both the Harada Method and how it shaped Ohtani’s development.

She had never come across something that so cleanly and accessibly tethered small habits to large ambitions.

Frei eventually co-authored a case study for the Harvard Business School titled “Shohei Ohtani: Achieving the Dream.” She also started to teach the method to her students.

“I’m talking six months after they’ve done it, I get the most beautiful emails about how this has helped change their lives,” she said. “They say everything they’re doing now makes sense, and all parts of them are rowing in the same direction. They’re not at odds with one another.”

When Ohtani came up with the eight boxes that would surround his central dream of being the No. 1 pick, some were tied directly to performance (speed, conditioning, sharpness), while others were tied to the type of person he needed to become (mental strength, character, karma).

Frei argues that balance is essential when creating subcategories around the main goal. She sees this as one of the defining features of the method: Excellence is not confined to performance alone. The habits that shape how a person carries themselves are just as important as the ones that shape their skills.

“Leadership is the practice of making others better,” she said. “First, as a result of your presence, but in a way that lasts into your absence. And I think there’s a lot of character and karma in that.”

But when Frei teaches the method, she encourages students to start with the center square and fill out only a few surrounding categories at first. That way they really take the time to mean what they’re writing down, rather than just trying to fill the boxes.

The rest can always be added over time.

After Ohtani added his eight subgoals around his central goal, each one of those subgoals was assigned its own set of eight actions. Those action boxes were intended to further break down the subgoals into activities or behaviors he could practice.

For example, in the boxes surrounding character and karma, Ohtani wrote: greeting people, picking up litter, keeping his bedroom clean and treating umpires with respect.

Next to sharpness, he wrote strengthening his wrist. And next to speed, he wrote gaining weight.

In the documentary “Shohei Ohtani: Beyond the Dream,” Ohtani said he was embarrassed when his goal chart was made public. He wanted to keep it hidden away. Then he explained that he “wasn’t trying to think too hard” when he wrote down his goals and subgoals. He just thought about what was important to him and what he “saw as necessary.”

“In the early stage, it helps to put in writing,” Ohtani said. “People have a tendency to forget. And as you continue what you’ve written, the things you do will eventually become second nature.”

That, Frei said, is the purpose of the method: to translate even smaller subgoals like strength, discipline or character into more narrowly defined action items that can be repeated.

To Frei, Ohtani’s goal sheet reveals a teenager who treated success as something that can be constructed over time. He constantly built it. That is what stands out most to her all these years later.

“I can see traces of who he is today, back in his ninth-grade artifact,” Frei said. “This is character and excellence by design.”