Learned about “The Harada Method”

I learned about The Harada Method today from a recent edition (June 20, 2026) of Liz Jung’s Flourished Hope newsletter. A quick Google^[1] search later and I learned more about the method from this article: Crush your goals the Ohtani way, by the Harvard Gazette.

The gist of it is basically this. You have a big, ambitious goal. One for years down the line. Imagine a 3x3 grid; place that goal in the center. Then think of 8 constituent goals or behaviors and place them in each of the surrounding 8 boxes in the grid. Then you can go further: create a 3x3 grid for each of the constituent goals and do the same for each. In the end you have a ton of small, doable, realistic steps to your ultimate aim. Apparently this was Shohei Ohtani’s^[2] own Harada Grid when he was in high school:

Pretty neat! I’ve had an interest in goal-setting for years. Basically, the Ancient Greek “telos.” (But I think more in terms of the phenomenological tradition.) I’ve long identified the necessity (a belief, or opinion, of mine, of course) of making clear one’s goals in the role of one’s ability to self-author their life. Though it might be inaccurate to say that we’re “making clear” of these goals, since I don’t think they are just sitting there pre-formed, then we come and realize “Oh, that’s what I wanted all along!” I think it’s probably more like they are formed in the process of discovery. (Again, I gravitate to the existential-phenomenological accounts. With a hint of Lacanian psychoanalysis.)

And at a higher level: an interest in the curiously elusive “What now—and why?”—and having pondered what my own is.

Anyway, The Harada Method is just another interesting way to “method-ize” goal-setting. To make a procedure out of something enigmatic. Or: a science out of something philosophical. It’s a useful framing and self-cue.