The Limitless Effect ♾️
Season 1 drops Sunday! Plus, NGL writes on his personal social media paradox
Inspired by the ideas that many online writing gurus champion, I decided to take a self-imposed, 30-day break from social media in April and publish one short essay a day to my Medium account.
I didn’t make it all the way to the end — I only uploaded 22 — but the exercise succeeded in its purpose, reminding me just how damn much I love to create things. Along with getting the juices flowing, giving me some of my confidence back, it allowed me to bank up my writing and let some of the thoughts and ideas marinate for a while.
Since then, I’ve worked with two different startups, graduated from Northwestern, and moved to Chicago, with various highs and lows in between. I’ve learned a lot about myself through this process, but the main thing I keep reminding myself is that I’m only 22, and I don’t need to have everything figured out just yet.
With that being said, I’m excited to say that starting this month, I’m working on Powder Blue full time. While I’ve been thinking about how I slot into the $104 billion “creator economy” for a good chunk of the last two years, I made a ton of progress in October and landed my first big client: a YouTuber with over 790k subscribers.
On top of that, on December 19, I’ll be dropping the first-ever magazine dedicated to covering the creators, investors, and founders building the creator economy. I first started thinking through this idea over a year ago, but it took constant cold emailing over the last several months to convince me that the project had legs, as well as land our first sponsor.
I’ll be providing more information on the services we’re providing and the stories we’ll be telling in the coming weeks and months. To get all of the latest content, product, and event drops, you can sign up for notifications here.
For now, I’ll be rolling out weekly video essays for Season 1 starting this Sunday, 11/21 at 7pm CDT. The first season, dubbed “Transitions,” is all about reflecting on our past while introducing our future. You can view the teaser trailer for Video Essay 1, “How Andrew Callaghan Rebranded Journalism,” below:
Past that, I’ll be putting out these newsletters over the next five weeks giving you all updates on Powder Blue and reflections on my journey. I’ve found that breaking my work up into sprints is a lot easier for me to manage then attempting to truly keep something weekly, so I’ll be recharging over New Years’ before beginning prep for Season 2 in January.
As always, feel free to hit me up with any comments below. I can’t wait to share what I’ve been building with you!
The Limitless Effect
Author’s Note: This essay has been modified since it was originally published in April 2021.
Whenever I log onto YouTube (which is more than I’d like to admit), there’s a near 95% chance I get a recommendation for clips from some random movie with a cult following.
Unsurprisingly, some of those YouTube channels that thrive off of waning attention spans to reach people where they’re at — if I have three-to-five minutes of spare time on a random Tuesday afternoon, of course I’ll watch that chase scene from Casino Royale that I’ve already seen! — have millions of subscribers. It’s a pretty tried-and-true formula, and there may not be a better nominee for That Movie I Rewatch Solely in YouTube Clips than the 2011 Bradley Cooper-helmed flick, Limitless.
Around the time it came out, the movie was mostly greeted with an audible “meh” by critics. At best, it was a fun, visually-stimulating concept that more so served as a vehicle to confirm what we all knew and cement Bradley Cooper’s rise to A-lister stardom post-Hangover. At worst, it was an uneven script and tonally-challenged flick that might’ve pulled a Wolf of Wall Street in glorifying a particular lifestyle a little too much while trying to provide commentary on the pitfalls of said lifestyle.
Nevertheless, I found myself hooked the other day re-watching clips from the film. The central concept — If we supposedly only use 20% of our brain’s capacity, what would happen if we were able to unlock the other 80%? — convinced me to do something I’ve been wanting to try again for a while: a social media cleanse.
No, I don’t believe that turning off all the notifications and deleting all the apps will allow me to “unlock” parts of my brain that I haven’t used before. But during a very difficult winter for me — mentally, physically, spiritually, everything-y — I attempted to track my behaviors more, and the days I felt worse were the ones where something seemed to overwhelm me and to cope, I kept looking for that dopamine rush forever associated with a colorful notification.
The problem is, when you keep going back for that brief hit, the side effects are inevitable: headaches, tiredness, depression. And for me, I end up in my head, paralyzed, trying to just get away from everything.
So instead of taking the Limitless pill, instead of leaning in for the dopamine hit of social media, I tried the opposite by abstaining and hoping that some of the gunk floating around my brain is put to better use. The goal — for those 30 days, at least — was to channel the same energy and time I instinctively dedicate to flipping over to Twitter and instead into what’s actually good for me in writing.
And…it worked! I was happier — and more productive — in April than I’d been in a long time. While I understand that everyone’s relationship with social media is different, for me, detoxing was clearly the healthiest solution.
Regardless, I’ve always told myself that the only thing holding me back from deleting all of the apps is its necessity in the modern-day professional world. Yet when it’s actively stalling me from contributing to that world, I see it as nothing more than a destructive paradox to be trapped in on the daily. It helps that Alt Investor Icon Chamath Palihapitiya seems to agree with me on this premise:
Yes, Chamath made his money from being an early employee at Facebook and is using a social media platform in Twitter to broadcast this particular message. No, that doesn’t mean he’s not allowed to criticize his former employer and their competition.
Besides, as I’ve begun working with other creators, it’s interesting how a lot of people who make their living in the industry purposely power down their accounts when they clock out for the day. The guy who literally invented the Facebook like button even deleted the app from his phone. In all, we’ll see if I’m able to balance screen time effectively over the coming months — after all, I am publishing this newsletter and reaching viewers using social tools.
It’s fitting that I started on my journey by launching Unplugg’d at the end of high school, when everyone was out at the beach and I was hacking away at my laptop trying to become the next Bill Simmons. After a difficult, strange year to finish up college — a time of universal dread for many even when there isn’t a once-in-a-generation-pandemic raging across the globe — I’m finally feeling excited and happy about the future, and go figure it’s all concluding in a similar way to how it began.
Oh, I’ll be back in a sec — I gotta go rewatch the scene where Robert DeNiro shows up in Limitless. There’s a Netflix show now, too?!?!
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