At 3 a.m. on a Wednesday morning in August last year, I reached the summit of Mt. Fuji to wait in the frigid air for sunrise. With a stress fracture in one foot and needlessly fatigued, having spent the entire previous night awake, I was not in the best of conditions. I would have preferred to have hiked the mountain with a friend, but due to poor planning I’d gone alone. In fact, after spending two months in Japan with virtually no constraints on my schedule, having gone on a dozen other, lesser hikes throughout Japan, I climbed Mt. Fuji because I was leaving Japan that week and I knew I’d regret it if I skipped Fuji.

I’ll never forget the sunrise; it was beautiful. It just didn’t seem as important as it should have been.

Climbing Mt. Fuji had been, ultimately, just a goal that I carried around with me, for years, until I got through with it. It could have been personally very significant. I had studied Japanese since I was kid and never made it to Japan until my mid-thirties. And I love hiking… And after being stuck without extended leave or travel time for four years in my previous work, I had longed for a sojourn. But we just can’t humanly crave and value all of our goals equally. I’d already had four months off by the time I made my way to Fuji; I’d already spent two months in Japan. The trip had served its purpose, and it wasn’t furthering my career or feeding my central passions. I almost didn’t bother to do it!

But I did climb it, and then I came back to the U.S., and something odd happened…

Back home, a feeling started to dawn on me, like the sun breaking upward through the cloud cover. Having knocked out a few of the goals that I considered whimsical, inconsequential, I had suddenly ended up without any goals. “Unimportant” as they were, completing my sojourn, finally setting foot in Japan, and finally setting foot on Fuji’s summit had all decluttered me. The big goals were already out of the way, since I’d left my position at Kaplan more than half a year earlier. So, post-Fuji, the “spring cleaning” of my goals was complete. Nothing left: purity. I was goal-naked.

Inevitably, something new was about to happen. And new goals started to appear to me with new freshness and focus.

One of those new goals was to create GMAT Free. That’s why this site has an image of Mt. Fuji in the background. Contrary to my expectations, Mt. Fuji freed me to pursue my goals, and it inspired me to create GMAT Free as a step to help others be free to pursue theirs.

A lesson for myself is not to judge my own goals so readily. Perhaps we overly encourage ourselves and each other to prioritize continuously and be mindful of outcomes, in a kind of spiritless hypermaturity. The way I see it now, every inconsequential goal is a new shot at freedom.

This article is part of a new series, The Leader’s Brief. Subscribe to the digest at www.theleadersbrief.com.