Ohtani 9x9 Grid Goal-Setting: How the 64-Action Chart Works

At Hanamaki Higashi High School in Iwate, Japan, in the winter of his first year (2010-11), a sixteen-year-old pitcher filled in a sheet of paper divided into 81 squares. In the middle square he wrote the biggest thing he could imagine: to be picked in the first round of the professional draft by eight teams. Out at the edges, among 64 much smaller squares, he wrote things like pick up the trash and clean my room. The student was Shohei Ohtani, and the sheet is now widely known as the Ohtani 9x9 grid, or the Ohtani goal chart.

The short answer: The Ohtani 9x9 grid is a square of 81 boxes: one big goal in the center, eight supporting goals around it, and eight small actions for each support, 64 in all. It comes from Japan, where versions of the layout are known as the Mandala Chart, Mandal-Art and, for goal-setting specifically, Open Window 64. It works by turning a wish into things you can do this week.

What happened to that chart, including the part that did not come true, is a better lesson in goal-setting than most books on the subject.

The chart a high-school pitcher filled in

Ohtani's coach at Hanamaki Higashi, Hiroshi Sasaki, had every player fill in a goal sheet like this one. Who first taught it is disputed. The Harada Institute says Ohtani used the Harada Method there, learned by Sasaki from the institute itself (2017; on the Wall Street Journal, 2018). Sasaki's own account, excerpted on nippon.com, says the sheet was his own design, built from corporate training systems and business books. Neither rules out the other, and no source settles it. Players lived on campus and went home about six days a year, per Wikipedia.

Around his center goal, Ohtani placed eight supports: building his body, control, sharpness, speed of 160 km/h, breaking balls, luck, character and mental strength (Sports Nippon, first published 2 February 2013, via draft-kaigi.jp). Four of the eight are pitching skills — control, sharpness, breaking balls and the 160 km/h speed target — and one is his body. The other three, luck, character and mental strength, get the same space on the page as his fastball.

And the actions around luck are the ones people remember: picking up litter, cleaning his room, his attitude toward umpires, reading books, being someone people support, and greetings. A teenager who wanted to be a top draft pick decided that picking up litter belonged in the plan, next to fastball speed. Superstition or good manners, it was small enough to do that afternoon.

The goal that did not come true

Here is the part usually left out. In October 2012, four days before the Japanese professional draft, Ohtani announced that he wanted to skip Japan's league and go straight from high school to Major League Baseball in the United States (2012 NPB draft). Most teams stayed away, wary of spending a pick on a player who might never sign. On draft day, October 25, 2012, exactly one team chose him in the first round: the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.

Not eight teams. One. The Fighters won him over with a pitch about minor-league life abroad and the chance to both pitch and hit. He signed, played five seasons in Japan, and joined the Angels in 2018. By early 2026 the Harvard Gazette was counting two World Series titles and four MVP awards.

Meanwhile, one support came true exactly. One square said, in effect, speed 160 km/h — and on 19 July 2012, in an Iwate prefecture semifinal, he threw exactly that (99 mph), the first Japanese high-schooler ever recorded at the mark (Number).

The lesson: the center is a direction, the squares are the work

It would be easy to tell this as "write down your dream and it will happen." That is not what happened. The exact goal in the center square missed, partly because of a choice Ohtani made himself. What did happen was bigger than the goal he wrote, and it grew out of the other squares.

Three lessons are worth taking from that:

• Write the center goal big, but hold it loosely. It points you in a direction, not a contract with the future.
• Spend your effort on what you control. Ohtani could not control eight draft rooms. He could control whether he trained, practiced and picked up the trash.
• Plan for the parts of you that are not skills. Mind, character and luck earned their own blocks, because goals usually fail for reasons other than a missing skill.

One honest caveat: nobody can prove the chart made him the player he became — talent, coaching and years of work cannot be pulled apart. What it did was keep the plan visible. If you want to keep the grid beside your weekly plan rather than on a loose sheet, our 2027 goal planner places its four-page version near the front, before the year's dated weeks.

Where the Ohtani 9x9 grid comes from

The grid is older than Ohtani's chart, and its history is more tangled than most pages let on.

The nine-square layout was developed in 1979 by the Japanese consultant Yasuo Matsumura, who called his tool the Mandala Chart (Mandala Chart Association; Japanese Wikipedia). In English creativity books it usually appears as the Lotus Blossom technique, credited to "Yasuo Matsumura of Clover Management Research in Chiba City" (Michalko). In 1987 the designer Hiroaki Imaizumi published his own version, Mandal-Art, in a book about note-taking for creativity (hanmoto); Japanese Wikipedia says it built on Matsumura's method, but as an idea-generation tool, not a goal-setting one.

Takashi Harada is a separate figure again: a former Osaka junior-high teacher whose track and field athletes won 13 individual national titles in seven years (Japanese Wikipedia). He built a 9x9 goal grid of his own, Open Window 64, one tool of his wider Harada Method, and has said the grid alone is not enough — he pairs it with a written long-term goal sheet (President Online). No source ties Open Window 64's origin to either Matsumura's or Imaizumi's chart; the honest description is a mandala-style layout Harada built for goal-setting.

Three names, three purposes: the Mandala Chart and Lotus Blossom for creative thinking, Mandal-Art for generating ideas, Open Window 64 for goals. Ohtani's chart follows the goal-setting shape.

How to build your own 9x9 goal grid

You need one sheet of paper and one quiet sitting for a first pass. Write one big goal you could prove in the center, eight supports around it (not just skills: take the hint from Ohtani's ring, which gave luck and character the same room as his fastball), and eight small actions for each support, each one something you could do this week. Then look at it every week.

The full step-by-step, a blank layout and a worked example are on our page about using a 9x9 grid for goal setting. If you are stuck on the goal itself, a wheel of life assessment or an ikigai exercise may help you think it through.

From one sheet of paper to a whole year

A sheet of paper is a good place to start, but it cannot carry the chart into your weeks.

That is the gap we built The Life I'm Building to close. Its 9-grid goal map is spread over four pages so every square is big enough to write in, and each of the eight supports then gets its own goal ladder: quarter milestones, monthly mini-goals, a weekly habit and a daily ten-minute action. The 2027 edition runs 53 dated weeks; if you would rather start on any Monday, there is an undated edition too. Neither book claims Ohtani's endorsement — it borrows the shape of his chart, nothing more.

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