01, The Method
The sheet Ohtani
filled out at 15.
As a high-school student in Japan, Shohei Ohtani filled out a Harada-style goal sheet: one central goal, eight surrounding pillars, sixty-four concrete daily behaviors. That sheet has become the most cited artifact in youth baseball development, and it is the structural foundation the Earned system is built around.
The Canonical Spine · 1 → 8 → 64
One central goal
The goal Ohtani wrote in the center cell was not "win the Cy Young." It was the top pick across the eight teams in Japan's professional baseball draft. Concrete. Bounded. Verifiable. A goal a fifteen-year-old could actually carry.
Eight supporting pillars
The sheet's pillars are heterogeneous on purpose, mechanical, physiological, tactical, dispositional, characterological. Body core and pitching mechanics sit beside be a person people root for and pick up trash. Mastery lives across all of them, not just in the measurable ones.
Sixty-four daily behaviors
Eight habits beneath each pillar, today's action, tomorrow's action, the action after that. The sheet is the plan. The daily view is a projection of it. The full grid is the data model; the daily challenge is a current selection from it.
Analogue 01
The Harada Method
The Japanese planning grammar that Ohtani's sheet instantiates. Its central claim is that disciplined action aligned with long-horizon purpose builds athletic capability and dispositional foundation as inseparable parts of one process. Character is not an extra column you add, it is what the method is for.
The relevance to Earned is twofold: a principled basis for treating character as a first-class element of the architecture, and a recognizable register, structured, serious, process-oriented, modest about outcomes.
Analogue 02
The Kumon Operating Model
Kumon is the closest existing analogue for the center-plus-home model Earned is built around. A network of recurring physical centers, individualized small-step progression, instructor oversight, daily home practice between center visits, and a routine identity that becomes part of how families organize their lives.
Kumon's worksheets were an accidental feature of when the system was built. Earned uses contemporary software not because it is fashionable but because it is what allows the coordination work to be done at scale with the quality that makes the operating model worth scaling.