The Delulu Network School

Last week I wrote about visiting Network School in Johor, where people pay RM6000 a month to live around ambitious people. The food and the gym are nice. The actual product is proximity. Being in the room with people who are levelling up makes you level up. That's the trade.

The thing is I can't pack up and live there right now. I'm still at my parents' place, with a setup here and a life here. So I've been thinking about whether you can manufacture some version of that proximity in your own room, even when the people aren't in it.

My friends call this kind of thing delulu. I'm leaning in.

The premise is older than the slang. You become like the five people you spend the most time with. If the five real ones aren't available, you cheat, and you let imagined ones fill the gaps. The brain doesn't entirely know the difference between sitting next to a founder and listening to one talk for an hour. Athletes rehearse the shot before they take it. Marathon runners visualize the race before they run it. The trick has been around forever. The only thing new is calling it delulu.

Here's what I'm actually doing.

The desk faces a wall I've put deliberate things on. Not a vision board with a Lambo on it. A printed page from a book I keep going back to. A photo of someone whose work I want mine to look like in five years. A small index card with one sentence I'm trying to live by this quarter. Boring, but it's the first thing my eyes land on when I sit down, and over months that adds up.

Audio is the lever I underrated for a long time. When I'm walking or doing chores, I have founders and writers I respect talking in my ear. Not as background noise, more as a roommate. After a few months you start absorbing their sentence patterns and their priorities. It's the cheapest mentorship in the world and you don't have to introduce yourself.

Books on the desk, not the shelf. Out of sight is out of mind. I keep three or four of the ones I want to absorb in my peripheral vision and open them at random when I'm stuck.

I dress slightly better than the day requires. Nobody is coming over. That's the point. The idea is the room thinks I'm about to do something serious, so I do.

I keep one chair empty on purpose. When I'm working through something hard, sometimes I imagine somebody specific is sitting in it and I'm explaining the problem to them. Usually it's a person I admire who would call me out if I was being lazy or unclear. I'm aware how this sounds. I also keep doing it because it works.

The whole setup is delulu in the most literal sense. I'm pretending to be in a room I'm not in. The bet is that pretending hard enough, for long enough, slowly narrows the gap between the room I'm in and the one I want to be in. Identity first, behavior follows.

Network School works because the proximity is real. My version is fake, and I'm fine with that. Real proximity is still the gold standard, and I'll keep flying to actual rooms when I can. But on the days I can't, the printout on the wall and the founder in my headphones are doing more for me than nothing.

If it's slightly delulu, fine. The alternative is sitting in a perfectly sane room becoming nothing in particular.