Superhuman Trends:
2022 Tech Trends of the Year
for Personal Development

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Trend #3: VR Upskilling

Key Insight

The Virtual Reality (VR) market size is $4.8B in 2021 and is expected to grow to $12B by 2024.⁶ While most think about Virtual Reality (VR) for games and movies, the opportunities for personal growth applications are virtually endless.

VR is not only a powerful tool for upskilling but also a game-changer for accelerating habit development. Why? Research shows that habit building is a function of frequency. Increasingly, people will use virtual reps to encode habits faster than ever before.

Description

Donald Hebb once said, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” In other words, repetition reinforces pathways in the brain. The more we practice/experience a skill, the more internalized and effortless that skill becomes.

You see, practice allows us to achieve what researchers call “unconscious competence.”⁷ That is achieved when we no longer have to think about knowing the topic—like becoming fluent in a new language.

How does this relate to VR? Research shows that VR learning is more effective at accelerating “becoming” than any other form of media ever created (such as books, podcasts, and video).⁸

In the words of Jeremy Bailenson (the Director of the Virtual Human Interactions Lab at Stanford University):

VR feels real, and its effects on us resemble the effects of real experiences. Consequently, a VR experience is often better understood not as a media experience, but as an actual experience, with the attendant results for our behavior.

At this point, you might be wondering: why not just practice the skill in real life? It’s a great question. Now, consider that real-life experiences often come with time, money, location, energy, and risk/safety constraints, to name a few.

One way that last constraint—risk/safety—is being handled? Enter STRIVR, a VR application that helps both amateur and professional football players train in virtual simulations, allowing users to rapidly get reps and learn complex playbooks, all the while avoiding injury (in a notoriously dangerous sport).

The most significant promise of VR? The ability to give people access—while location-independent—to word-class instruction and experiences that create measurable change within. In other words: the ability to democratize psychologically powerful upskilling for humanity.

Am I being overdramatic? You might think so. But don’t kid yourself by overlooking VR. It’s a game-changer.

How You Can Benefit

High-performing athletes have long cited visualization as an effective training tactic.

For example, Michael Phelps, with goggles full of water, won the 200m Butterfly in the 2012 Beijing Olympics (incidentally, also setting a world record). After the race, a reporter asked what it had felt like to swim blind. Phelps’s answer? “It felt like I imagined it would.” ⁹

Well, if you’re anything like me, you may struggle with visualization…and fail to reap the benefits. VR solves that problem.

Standford’s Professor Bailenson agrees:

The mere act of thinking about an action, for instance, produces brain activity similar to what you’d see if the action were actually being performed. But that is only if the visualization is done the right way. The problem, of course, is that there is a high variability in how well people can visualize and put themselves in those situations. With VR, coaches and trainers can create visualizations for players. ¹⁰

The message is clear: in VR, users can be guided through a wildly effective visualization (with their eyes wide open).

Whether you’d like to practice public speaking, face a phobia, or engage in immersive language learning…VR personal growth experiences are rapidly emerging.

If you’re curious, Facebook’s Oculus Quest and Sony’s Playstation VR dominate the VR headset market. The two players make up nearly 60 percent of the market share (Facebook, 38.7,  and Sony, 21.9).¹¹ You can browse on-demand experiences in their respective app stores.

Lessons from the Field

Admittedly, my claim of accelerating everyday habits through VR may be a little premature. That said, I want to get this on your radar, because I think encoding habits with VR will be a big deal. Along with the broader category of habit-building IoT devices (habitech).

My obsession with accelerating habits started while reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits. One section, in particular, hit me like a ton of feathers (weighs the same as a ton of bricks):

“If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection,” says Clear. Then he goes on to say, “Habits form based on frequency, not time.”¹²

Key word there: frequency.

If habit development is a function of frequency, then, to accelerate habit development, we simply need to practice the habit. Much like building muscles through repetition, we can create a habit-encoded mind through repetition!

Hang in there. I know, it’s a lot of feathers.

Say you want to build a powerful morning routine of:

1. Rising from bed immediately when your alarm sounds
2. Waking up your mind/body with two minutes of jumping rope
3. Drinking a full (smart) bottle of water
4. Etc…

Practicing the entire routine in real life would be time-consuming, energy-draining, and impractical.

Now, imagine a VR application that guides you through a mental rehearsal of your desired routine—aligned to habit theory (cue, desire, action, reward). A program that cycles through virtual practice faster than a person could complete the steps in real life.

Users could record their desired habit (or habit stack), allowing them to rehearse the routine whenever and wherever they want virtually. Remember: VR is very effective at wiring and firing neurons—a.k.a. driving actual programming within.

The ability to practice habit(s) repeatedly—with less time, money, risk, etc.—could quickly supersede the benefits of real-life habit rehearsal. This technology would allow people to encode habits faster than ever before—and, ultimately, enable users to create upgraded versions of themselves in real life.

I’m not aware of anyone building this. Do you think fast-tracking habit development with VR is a good idea? If so, drop me a line on Twitter.

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Trend #4: Exponential Energy

Key Insight

Published in 2003, The Power of Full Engagement was an instant best-seller. The book's main takeaway: managing your energy is more valuable than managing your time. Nearly 20 years later, thanks to technological advances, people have better tools to quantify (and optimize) their energy.

Description

Energy management without time management means potently working on the wrong things. Time management without energy management means impotently working on the right things.

The holy grail: When you combine time and energy management, you will be working on high-value activities at peak energy states…a recipe for flow.

A few breakthrough energy management technologies include:

• Oura Ring: track and measure sleep, heart rate, body temperature, activity levels, and more
• Food sensitivity tests: Kits from companies like Everlywell to see your body’s immune response to 96+ foods
• At-home high-intensity interval training (HIIT)—powered by tech-enabled equipment like Tonal, Peloton, and Mirror

How You Can Benefit

Being in a flow state is a great feeling. And can be highly productive.

Take McKinsey' s ten-year study, which found that executives are 500 percent more effective when in flow.

A leading author on flow, Steven Kotler, emphasizes, “This means, if you spend Monday in flow, you can actually take the rest of the week off and still get more done than your steady-state peers.”¹³

Unfortunately, the same McKinsey study found that most of us spend less than 5 percent of our work-life in flow.

Why? Well, the answer is simple: most people don’t strategically manage the factors that influence flow (like energy and time).

Often I see friends and clients doing low-energy tasks in peak energy states. You see, energy management is about “creating it, investing it, and not wasting it. ¹⁴

The following quote from Duke University Professor Dan Ariely advances this point:

One of the saddest mistakes in time management is the propensity of people to spend the two most productive hours of their day on things that don't require high cognitive capacity (like social media). If we could salvage those precious hours, most of us would be much more successful in accomplishing what we truly want.¹⁵

Now, let’s discuss how to create and sustain more energy.

Lessons from the Field

Disclaimer: While I am a NASM Certified Personal Trainer, I am not a licensed dietitian. The below information is based on a sample size of 1: my own experience.

My bet is the most successful people in the future will be those who strategically use technology to manage and direct their energy. Making technology a tool, and not the other way around.

It starts with aligning all of your personal systems to the purpose of energy optimization: fitness, nutrition, sleep, relationships, career, etc.

One common mistake I see is people with conflicting personal systems. For example, they want to have a bodybuilder’s physique and optimize for clear thinking (to excel in their knowledge-based career).

I sympathize. I used to consume a grueling amount of (lean!) protein to try and build muscle. Naturally, I’d be in a perpetual state of lethargy. This plan was like walking up a down-moving escalator.

You see, to achieve a sidewalk-cracking physique, bodybuilders regularly consume 10,000+ calories per day. Imagine the amount of energy that’s expended processing all that food! Bodybuilders make a massive sacrifice in their energy to look the way they do. (One reason I suspect mental health is a major issue in the sport.)

Another example of conflicting systems: imagine you’re an ambitious person in a relationship with someone who wants to live a more whimsical life. As a result of these misaligned values, your partner may inadvertently (or intentionally) make you feel bad for working hard, draining you of emotional energy. Again, trying to walk up a down-moving escalator.

Donella Meadows, the legendary systems thinker, sums up my point perfectly:

When a subsystem’s goals dominate at the expense of the total system’s goals, the resulting behavior is called suboptimization.¹⁶

Want to learn more about energy management? Check out my free ultimate guide on the topic.

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Trend #5: LIFE SYSTEM BUILDING

Key Insight

You can think of this one as a “meta-trend.” It enables you to implement all the other growth trends in this report. Launched in March 2022, System Sunday is my new blog that teaches people why systems are greater than habits (and which tech products enable the strongest systems). At the core of System Sunday is a weekly meeting with yourself: a time to get in “the lab” and systematically design the life you choose.

Description

In the words of James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”¹⁷

My question is, when do you actually create those “life systems”? In other words, how much time do you spend reviewing your habits (and whether they're working for or against you)? For most of us, it's zero.

Enter the System Sunday Method. A weekly one-hour session with yourself—broken down into two activities: review and optimize.

1. Review (30 mins): First, we review how the prior week went through quantitative and qualitative reflection.
   
   Quantitative: you'd be surprised how many data points about your life are already being tracked…your step count, your phone pickups, etc. Imagine reviewing those regularly to spot trends over time. Now imagine automating even more interesting data through new tech products (like sleep quality, hydration, etc.). System Sunday gathers the most game-changing products to do just that. Check out these seven metrics.
   
   Qualitative: Based on the quantitative results, I jot down my qualitative reflections in a journal. For example, perhaps I noticed that I didn’t hit my meditation target of ten minutes per day. I’d note the gap in performance and reflect on how this impacted my energy, mood, focus, etc.
   
   
2. Optimize (30 mins): Next, we figure out how to improve our performance in the coming week. Here we use systems thinking to identify the levers for growth. That’s how we address slipping performance and do more of what's good for us.
   
   Again, take my previous example of missing my meditation target. In the optimization phase, I’ll consider the root causes of why I didn’t meditate as much as I’d have liked. Was it a mental model issue (like a slip in motivation because I wasn’t feeling any direct “impact”), a structural issue (like a failure to block out time in my calendar), or both? The key here: take the next step that gets you back on track.
   
   Say it was a structural issue—I might set up a daily calendar invite at the same time as my alarm (and put my phone on Do Not Disturb at night), so it’s the only thing I see the next morning.

“Optimize” is also the step where you discover products to upgrade your systems. For example, I bought a subscription to the Waking Up app created by Sam Harris to better structure and track how frequently I was meditating. You can discover the best products and technology in the free System Sunday newsletter, which showcases a cutting-edge product every—you guessed it—Sunday.

How You Can Benefit

As a famous quote (often erroneously attributed to Abraham Lincoln) tells us: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.”

The weekly System Sunday meeting with yourself is how we sharpen the ax. It’s ritualizing a time to work on your life, not in it. More than a step-by-step process, System Sunday is an ethos for taking care of your future self.

My mission is to help people see the value of strategic planning. So you can go from anxious and uncertain to confident and in control. If there’s only one idea for you to take away from this entire report, may it be this: to give yourself the gift of strategic time. Whether you choose to invest some of that time with me at System Sunday is entirely your decision.

Lessons from the Field

For nearly four years, I’ve kept the weekly calendar date with myself, “System Sunday.”

The results have been life-changing. You can learn more about my journey here.

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Trend #6: Smart Environment Design

Key Insight

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, writes, “Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.”¹⁸ Clear teaches that people often overvalue the roles of motivation, talent, and effort in building habits. In reality, the highest point of behavioral change leverage—and path of least resistance—is intentional environment design.

Description

I like this question from Clear: “How can we design a world where it’s easy to do what’s right?”¹⁹

Environment design begins with thinking about your environment in terms of relationships and interactions. What’s most interesting here is that person-to-environment interactions occur at each of the five human senses.

So get this: people can design highly-productive environments by optimizing each sensory category.

OK, here’s what I’m talking about:

A lot of possibilities. Now, let’s talk about the benefits…

How You Can Benefit

People can thoughtfully curate their person-environment interactions to be more productive than they ever thought possible.

Realize that—at any moment—our experience is the product of our senses. Key word there: product.

And by stacking positive sensory interactions, you can create a force multiplier for productivity. On the other hand, if any sense is genuinely out of whack (a zero on the scale), it will undoubtedly affect your productivity. Think jackhammer right outside your window.

And the rule of multiplying by zero tells the outcome: Any number, no matter how large, multiplied by a zero, is a zero.

Mental toughness and willpower are important. But if you can optimize each sensory function in your curated environment, wouldn’t that be the easier, smarter path?

Lessons from the Field

During the pandemic, I bought a mountain home in Vermont. Moving was an excellent opportunity to clear the closet (literally) and design a more thoughtful home environment.

Admittedly, I sacrificed a lot leaving NYC. Proximity to close friends, access to world-class cultural events, and banana bread pudding from Magnolia. But the upside of designing my dream home environment has surpassed my expectations.

Here are some of my learnings—for each of the five senses:

• Vision: One powerful vision tactic is to mimic outdoor lighting in indoor spaces—by using blue lights. Research shows the blue lights suppress melatonin, a chemical that makes us sleepy.²⁰ In other words, people can use daylight blue to stay awake.
  
  Increasingly, individuals (and companies) are optimizing their workspace lighting to boost energy levels. I strategically use blue light in the mornings and through the early afternoon to stay alert. I’ve installed blue lighting throughout my home office.
  
  Alternatively, I switch my home office to “red light” around 5 PM (to avoid the negative impact on my sleep). Keep in mind that electronic devices also emit blue light. I use Flux App on my desktop and the “Night Shift” setting on my iPhone to filter out blue light in the evening.
  
  Sidenote: More and more biohackers wear blue-light blocking glasses as they wind down their day. I’ll be experimenting with these in the coming year to further optimize for deep sleep.

• Sound: Scoring your day is a great tactic to elevate your mood and encourage focus. Who else here loves the hypnotic ambiance that resonates throughout spas and resorts? I’ve recreated that feeling in my home with Sonos One speakers—powered by Bluetooth 5 technology.
  
  For music, I recommend focus@will. But my favorite Spotify playlist when I need to get shit done: Pirates of the Caribbean. Weird? Perhaps. Effective? Absolutely.

• Touch: There’s a quote from the documentary Minimalism that I try to live by:
  

  We are too materialistic in the everyday sense of the word, and we are not at all materialistic enough in the true sense of the word. We need to be true materialists, like really care about the materiality of goods.²¹

  By purchasing fewer things and going for higher quality, you’ll declutter your environment, limit decision fatigue, and derive more utility from each of your possessions. What we own becomes an extension of who we are. So, if we’re going to possess something, shouldn’t we at least appreciate it?

• Taste: I’m a big fan of drinking Bulletproof Coffee throughout my morning “deep work” time block. Often referred to as “butter coffee,” Bulletproof boosts my cognitive function by fueling my brain with the essential fats it requires to operate at its best. My Bulletproof potion of choice? Ghee, MCT Oil, and Nespresso (for convenience). Aside from Bulletproof, I typically intermittent-fast from 7 PM to 10 AM. The goal: delay energy-draining digestion until I finish my most important “deep work” task for the day.

• Smell: Author and performance coach Christopher Bergland shares, “The scents that you surround yourself with are in the locus of your control. You can put yourself in the driver's seat, and use fragrance as a tool to create a particular mindset and increase your motivation to achieve a target behavior.”²²
  
  You can take advantage of scent by using an aromatherapy diffuser, which can be very powerful in creating a productive state. From Jim Kwik’s book, Limitless, I learned that peppermint and lemon promote concentration.²³ As I’m writing this, my Vitruvi Diffuser is exhaling geranium (which is known to have a unique effect of both calming and stimulating). As for the essential oils, I like the brand Doterra.

Environment design is fun, isn’t it? The bulletin: by taking a design-first mentality in shaping your life, you’ll be able to engineer more empowering sensory outcomes. Leading to both productivity and greater happiness.

Can't get enough of environment design? Dive deeper in my free ultimate guide.

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Recap: Superhuman Trends 2022

Passengers, please put your tray table in the upright position for landing!

We’ll finish with a recap of the six tech trends set to transform personal development in 2022:

Which tech trend (listed above or otherwise) are you most excited about in the coming year? Let me know on Twitter.

One final thing: if you enjoyed my first annual Superhuman Trends report, please share it with others.

Share this report on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Text, or via email.

Cheers—here's to your personal innovation in 2022!