Justin Timberlake became unexpected inspiration for Grammy-winning singer

Pentatonix singer Kevin Olusola has revealed that it took him a Justin Timberlake concert to want to change how he thought about his music and career.

Olusola shares the story in his new book Designed to Succeed, which he co-wrote with life coach Donovan Dee Donnell. 

In an excerpt from the book, Olusola recalls being on tour in 2013 when he and his bandmates attended Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience World Tour concert in Amsterdam. 

At the time, Pentatonix was already enjoying major success, but Olusola says he still felt unsure about his purpose as an artist.

"By November 2013, I was exhausted, but that shouldn't have mattered. As a band, Pentatonix was living the dream. Our music had taken off. We'd spent every month of that year performing all over the United States in sold-out concerts. That fall we took our show overseas with our first tour in Europe. After shows in Italy, Germany, Austria, and France, we were now in Amsterdam, where we were scheduled for two nights at the iconic 1,500-person venue Paradiso. I should have been on top of the world, but internally, I was spinning," read the excerpt.

"Beneath the success a quiet question kept tugging at me, 'Why am I really here?' I had spent 25 years becoming a cellist, a scholar, a son of immigrants with a deep sense of mission, and suddenly I was plucked out of that trajectory into something I hadn't envisioned. Was keeping the beat for my bandmates all I had to offer? Was that really my sole purpose?"

He describes being deeply affected until the arena show, which felt like a “revelation” and showed him a new level of performance and creativity. 

"My bandmates and I were on fire when we piled into the car after the concert. The buzz was electric. No one could stop talking about what we had just experienced, except me. I sat still, staring out the window, too caught up in what I had seen to utter a word, until it finally burst out of me: 'That's what I want to do with my life!' Everyone laughed. 'You want to do what, exactly, Kevin?,'" he recalled his friends asking, to which he replied, "'Be an artist'".

Olusola says the moment made him think more seriously about his own creative identity and what kind of music he wanted to make in the future.

"I laughed along with them and didn't press the issue, but inside I was screaming," he reminisced. "I don't want to just perform. I want to create. I want to pour my soul into something and give people a transcendent experience. I want to channel everything God has placed inside me — the classical training, the modern sounds, the cultural collisions, the faith — and somehow turn that into sound. But how? That was the real question: How would I even begin? What was my sound? I loved classical music, but also hip- hop beats, and dance, and pop, and even electronic. Should I mash them all together? Should I just make a cello-beatboxing album? Was that even enough?" 

"The possibilities felt endless and, honestly, overwhelming. That's the tricky part about potential. When it first hits you, it doesn't show up as a perfectly wrapped plan. It often arrives as a holy discontent, a whisper from God that says, 'There's more.' But stepping into that more requires trust, a narrowing that feels not like loss but like alignment. I knew I couldn't find my sound — or even my potential — without God guiding me through the noise. Later, I had to ask, 'Lord, what have you put inside me that the world needs to hear? What does heaven sound like through me?'"

Designed to Succeed will be released on June 9.