Ana Searches for Meaning(ful work) with Tom from Pacha Greens

I have a brand-new YouTube channel whose starting point is Ana Searches For Meaning. With my friend Tom de Windt, an entrepreneur from Belgium who founded the micro-greens company Pacha Greens, I’m discussing meaningful work and passion, today. Check us out.

“Do you think it’s possible?” – I questioned while molding sourdough. Tom, my new friend, was teaching me the wonders of making bread with your own two hands while slicing limes for mojitos at the same time. That morning we had made wholewheat pancakes for breakfast, now we were making bread loaves, and I had just asked if we could make wholewheat pizzas for dinner. Apparently, Tom could make just about anything. He was the kind of person who grew vegetables on his own garden, and chicken, and repaired stuff, and traveled half of the world on his own and – not unimportant – also had an excellent music taste. A curious fact, he was surnamed after de Windt. Take off that Belgian “t” and, there you have, a poetic promise of greatness.

It was the first time ever that I was making bread. In my head, making pizza from scratch would be sort of the next logical step. “Do you think it’s possible?”, I cautiously asked, afraid I was asking too much. “Of course!” he replied immediately. “Of course! Everything is possible”, and he handed me a glass of mojito. “Here, try it.”. No one had ever told me that everything was possible. No one. Not even my dear mother, who thinks I am capable of everything. And no one had ever told me so with such conviction. I sipped the tasty liquid, trying to process, grinning like an idiot. It was not about the bread, nor the pizzas, anymore. The energy of that guy and the underlying mindset of his words were what struck me. Could it be that upon having an idea someone wouldn’t even question the convenience of the feasibility of it? Did people like that even exist?

Tom, and the experiences we’ve shared together during that trip, all were a source of inspiration for years to come. So when I started creating videos for my YouTube channel and decided that I wanted to interview everyone who’s been an inspiration for me, Tom was high on the list.

YouTube channel? I can hear you say, what are you talking about? Yes, I have a YouTube channel to which you can – I hope you will – subscribe here. It’s interesting because whenever I tell a friend that I’m doing this they say that they had no idea and that I don’t promote my work enough. So here I am doing the thing: telling everyone about it: I HAVE A YOUTUBE CHANNEL. I’m a newbie which is exciting because, *possibilities*. A world of them. For now, I need to reach this wonderful round number of 100 subscribers so that I can personalize the channel. This means that I NEED YOUR HELP. Yeah, like caps lock – dramatic.

As for Tom, you can get to know him here. We talked purpose, drive, spontaneity, meaningful work, and we intertwined all of it with the stories of how we met and how he started Pacha Greens, his business of organic micro-greens.