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Entrepreneur, musician, actor, and digital creator Gabriel Conte is adding author to his growing list of accomplishments. His debut book, A Mission For Meaning: The Choices that Lead to the Life You Really Want, has officially hit shelves today and is available wherever books are sold.

A Mission For Meaning: The Choices that Lead to the Life You Really Want brings readers behind the scenes of Conte’s rise to fame as he shares his secrets to success and how he created the life that he always dreamed of through intentional choices.

Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to speak with Gabriel about A Mission For Meaning: The Choices that Lead to the Life You Really Want, the power and impact of choices, and more.

PC: We’re a couple of days away from the release of A Mission for Meaning. What can readers and fans of yours expect when they pick up a copy of this book?
Gabriel: I’ve been working on this book for two years. It’s about putting weight on the choices that you make every day and how so much of your life can be shaped by small choices. I mentioned this in the book, but it’s compound interest. The choices that you make, even if they may seem small or insignificant, will lead to really big compound interest on a long-term basis throughout your life. That is the overarching theme of the book. It’s about making intentional choices.

“Intentionality” was a word that we kept coming back to as we were going through this book and as I was writing it. It’s really living with intention and having a clear mission for your life and the trajectory you’re headed towards. It’s about setting goals for yourself and shaping those smaller choices that you make day-to-day so that you can follow the course of life that you want to be heading towards. Because if you’re letting life happen to you, you’re living defensively. You’re going to be living reactionarily. Ten or twenty years down the line, you’re going to look back and question how all of this happened.

There are things in life that won’t be in your control, right? But you’re in control of yourself and you’re in control of the choices that you make. Those choices will have consequences, good or bad. The more intentional you are with the specific choices that you’re making day-to-day and the habits that you’re building, it will change the trajectory of your life.

It sounds like a self-help book, but it actually recaps a lot of my story and my family’s story. I share all of those thoughts and feelings that I have through personal stories. It goes back to my grandparents and leads all the way through my life, showing intentional choices that were made, not just in my life but even the choices that my grandparents and parents made that completely changed the trajectory of my life several generations later. The choices that you’re making now are not just impacting you. They impact the people around you and future generations.

PC: Something that I really enjoyed about your book is that you took the position that you’re not here to instill your faith onto the reader. Rather, you want to share how your faith has impacted your own life. Why was that so important to you?
Gabriel: It would have been hard to write about my life without talking about my faith because it’s a huge part of who I am. But I’m very practical when it comes to the things that I do day-to-day and that’s tied to my faith. I wanted to share a lot of stories from my personal perspective but also not beat people over the head who may not share that same faith. But I still share my relationship with God and my faith and how it’s been beneficial and practical.

PC: As a content creator, you share so much of your life online, but this book finds you opening up a lot more. Was it ever a scary prospect to tap into that vulnerability?
Gabriel: It was. There’s always a fine line between how much you want to share versus how much to keep private. This felt like the right time. Over the years, as we grew in popularity, Jess and I realized that we needed to keep a few things more private. In the past, we were filming almost everything in our life. Over the years, we’ve kind of pulled back on our privacy. This book serves as a good recap. Not to sound cliche, but it really is an open book to my heart and my life and shares things that I’ve never shared before.

But I was able to craft it a bit more, rather than just filming me talking for a bit and then editing it together later and hoping it turned out well. In a book format, I’m actually able to share these stories accurately, revisit them, edit them a bit, and make sure that it’s exactly what I want to share and how I want to share it all. It really shares a lot more than I have shared in the past with my life because a lot of the things that I’ve shared in the past on social media were in real time, so it was what was happening at the moment.

Sometimes we would sit down and share a story. But this is a big book of stories. I’m sharing things that never came up before or going into more details about stories that people might not know, sharing a lot of behind-the-scenes things that happened when the cameras were off. For instance, my wife Jess is Australian and her residency process for the U.S. was very, very difficult and took a very long period of time. A lot of people know that if they follow us, but I was sharing things behind the scenes, and some of the fights that we had that we talked about were very, very private. It also includes how a lot of those things shaped our lives and the mistakes that I made that I learned from. It’s a beautiful, multi-generational story that leads through talking about living very intentionally, making choices, and how they affect your life.

PC: Family has been such a driving force throughout your career and your life. You’ve found such an innovative way to weave that into this story, having them share personal anecdotes. How did that come to fruition? What has it meant to you to get to share this milestone with them as well?
Gabriel: It’s been really cool to be able to honor my parents. I talk about it at the end. I say, “Not everything was perfect,” but I wanted to honor my parents and the good choices that they made that impacted our lives. I share some really dark stuff too. My mom has HIV. As a family, we had to work through that. My parents had to work through that. But I also share how that changed their lives and how that impacted us. I really tried to honor them through the stories that I told about them and the way I shared their story with the world.

It was really cool getting that phone call after they finished reading the book and hearing how they were impressed by it. They felt very loved by what I wrote about them and felt very honored. They were very, very happy and excited with what I put together. It was really cool getting to hear that from them because this book is very personal to our whole family. Getting that amazing response from them made it feel really, really special, like I did justice to my family’s story.

PC: This is also your debut book. Did anything surprise you about the experience putting this together? What was the biggest takeaway?
Gabriel: One thing that surprised me was how long it really takes to write a book because I started this process over two years ago. So much changed in that time. I found out about a year and a half in that my wife was pregnant. That changed so much of my approach to the book at that point when I was going back editing. There was so much in my life that was changing. I was adapting to prepare for a third family member. It gave me a new perspective with this new chapter of life starting. It really changed the way I approached some of the topics throughout the book.

I wasn’t expecting to grow as much as I did from writing the book. It was like a big therapy session for me over the course of two years, over what I was going through and the stories that I was telling and wanted to share. I was like, “Oh, this happened in my life. I need to put that in the book as well. How am I going to put it in?” It was pretty cool having it in real time when things were happening. The process is so long that I was able to infuse a lot in real time.

PC: You’re also releasing an audiobook along with the actual physical copy, which I imagine is a completely different experience when you’re writing it versus when you’re saying it out loud. What was that experience like? What can readers expect from the audiobook that’s a little bit different from the physical copy?
Gabriel: It was pretty cool. You can expect to hear my voice and my wife’s voice. There are certain bits where my wife is talking, so it’s cool having her be a part of that specifically. She’s part of the book because she’s part of all the stories, but having her part of that final product is really cool. There’s some banter in there between us and things like that in the audiobook that’s also in the physical version, but you’re hearing our voices. I didn’t realize how much I’d lose my voice from reading for four straight hours a day. There were multiple four-hour sessions that I did back-to-back. I’d finish those sessions and my voice would be dead from talking for hours and hours.

I also didn’t realize how bad I was at reading. I’d make up different words in different parts. But it was definitely a fun process. I’m excited that I was the one to record it, so when people listen to it, they’re not listening to a random voice—it’s me, the author, and my wife. The audiobook was a really cool thing to do and a really cool check on the bucket list too.

To keep up with Gabriel, follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Pick up your copy of A Mission For Meaning: The Choices that Lead to the Life You Really Want today.

Photo Credit: Andrew Woomer