I want to write this directly to the Asian professional who has found the Naora website, has read through it with the specific interest that indicates the disposition we are looking for, and who has concluded, on the basis of the founding team’s Belgian nationality and the departure from Bodrum and the general European framing of the voyage’s beginning, that Naora is a European product designed for a European market and that the interest they feel in it is an interest in something that was not built for them.
This conclusion is understandable and incorrect. Here is the correction.
The Route
The Naora circumnavigation departs from Bodrum and spends approximately six months in the Mediterranean before crossing the Atlantic and the Caribbean and transitioning to the Pacific. After the Pacific chapter, the route moves through the Indonesian archipelago for three months, then the Indian Ocean, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, the Seychelles, before the Red Sea return.
Of the five years and 45,000 miles of the circumnavigation, more than half are in the Indo-Pacific: the geographic region that connects the Asian world to the Pacific island cultures and to the Indian Ocean maritime tradition. The route is not a European route that visits Asia. It is a global route that spends the majority of its duration in the waters that surround the Asian hemisphere.
The Indonesian archipelago legs, the Indian Ocean legs, and the Pacific legs that connect them are not the exotic chapters of a European voyage. They are the central chapters of a global circumnavigation, and the member who joins them is joining the voyage in the waters that are geographically and culturally closest to the professional lives that the Hong Kong banker and the Singapore entrepreneur and the Tokyo architect have been building.
The sea between Borneo and Sulawesi, the reef at the Brothers Islands, the lagoon in the outer Tuamotu: these are not more distant from Singapore than from Brussels. Some of them are considerably closer.
The Circle
The Naora Circle is invitation-only and the invitation is not geographically bounded. The selection process applies the same criteria to the prospective member in Singapore that it applies to the prospective member in Antwerp: the specific quality of someone who has built something genuinely significant and who is honest enough with themselves to recognise that the significance did not produce the quality of presence and community and owned time alongside it.
This quality is not European. It is the quality that the high-performance professional culture produces in the people who have been fully formed by it, regardless of which city or which economy or which cultural tradition the high-performance professional culture in question belongs to.
The Naora Circle has Asian members. Not as a diversity initiative, not as a market expansion strategy: because the selection process found them and the conversation established the fit and the voyage provided what the fit described.
The Asian member at the Long Table in the Banda Sea is as fully a member of the Circle as the Belgian member at the Long Table in the Aegean. The offshore context does not distinguish between them. The Long Table does not distinguish between them.
The Circle that forms around the voyage does not distinguish between them. The founding team is Belgian. The voyage is for whoever the voyage is for, which turns out to be the person with the specific disposition regardless of the continent they are calling from.
The Invitation
The Calendly link opens the same thirty minutes with me regardless of where the person clicking it is located. The conversation is the same conversation. The fit question is the same question. The voyage that the fit question determines access to is the same voyage.
It departs from Bodrum and it spends three months in the Indonesian archipelago and it crosses the Pacific and the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea and returns to the Mediterranean, and along the route it builds a community that is as international as the specific disposition that the selection process identifies allows the community to be, which turns out to be considerably more international than the Belgian founding team’s nationality might suggest.
If you are in Singapore or Tokyo or Hong Kong or Seoul or Shanghai and you have been reading this website with the interest that indicates the fit might be real, the note I want to leave you with is this: the voyage was not built for Europeans. It was built for the person who has the specific quality that the voyage is designed for. You may be that person. The call is how we find out.
