Saturdays for Adventures, Sundays for Resets
By: Anjelica Tang (CAS ’27)
GRIP: GAO Capital in Singapore
Dear Anjelica,
You are not here to merely experience the summer of 2025. You are here to forge something from it. The city you live in will not bend to you. The people you work with will not always care about your comfort. The markets will not stop moving when you hesitate. And the world will not quiet itself for you to catch your breath. This is not cruelty. This is the nature of the game you have chosen to play.
Fear will whisper to you as it always has. It will say: Be careful. Stay small. Do not risk what you have for what you want. The woman you want to become will tell you, the more you act in spite of fear, the smaller fear becomes.
You will wake in a foreign city, dress yourself, and walk streets where nobody knows your name. This anonymity is not loneliness. It is training. In these days, you will learn to hold your own company like a fortress. You will learn to carry your discipline with you like an unshakable spine – in how you work, in how you eat, in how you choose rest over distraction.
Your mornings will begin with the humid air of Singapore wrapping itself around you. You will pass Maxwell Food Centre with its clatter and steam, the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple standing still and red against the early light. You will enter the building where you work – sleek, with a Michelin-starred restaurant at its base – and climb to your comfortable corner office upstairs, one room where you will spend the bulk of your days sharpening your eyes and mind.
You will learn the art of weekends. Saturdays are for expansion, for stretching time until it feels like a week’s worth of living: swimming in the infinity pool at Marina Bay Sands, strolling through the Botanic Gardens, meeting family friends for meals that make you feel less far from home. Sundays are for quiet repair, for giving Saturday’s adventures their contrast.
You will master the MRT without a phone, tracing stops and lines in your memory until the network feels like your own. And perhaps, when the time comes, you will stand in a New York subway station with the same confidence.
The work will not always thrill you, but it will refine you. Learn every tool. Listen for the questions no one else is asking. Notice the patterns, in markets and in leaders. These are the mental compounders that will make you valuable in rooms where you are no different from the well-educated in the room.
Your ambition is a fire, but you must build the walls that let it heat you without burning you. Those walls are your routines, your physical health, your clarity of mind.
There will be mornings when anxiety tries to dictate the day before it has begun. On those mornings, remember this: fear’s true nature is not to protect you but to give you signals and perhaps prevent change. You are not here to stay unchanged. You are here to conquer, to build.
Nature works in seasons. Some are for planting seeds in the cold, with no sign of reward. Some are for harvesting under heat and pressure. This summer is both – the planting of your habits and the harvesting of your first confidence that you can live anywhere, work with anyone, and keep building no matter the noise.
You will leave stronger not because life was gentle, but because you learned to hold your ground when it was not.
With strength and building wisdom,
Anjelica