If This Guy Could Make a Portrait Out of Toast, I Can Do Anything Sometimes keeping other people's weird accomplishments in sight helps to keep our own aspirations in perspective.
By Meganne Fabrega Edited by Frances Dodds
This story appears in the December 2021 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
I graduated from college in the early '90s with a major in Italian literature and no clue how I was going to make a living. I struggled to find my footing in a new city, on a new coast, working a variety of jobs, always looking for my "real" career. I was sorely in need of encouragement — from anyone, anywhere. One day I opened my mail and found it in the form of a note from my mother. She'd clipped out an image she found in Harper's Magazine; it was a portrait of John Gorrie, the inventor of the first artificial ice machine, that the artist Dennis Gephardt had made entirely out of pieces of toast.
"If someone can make a portrait out of toast," my mother wrote to me, "you can do anything."
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In this small gesture was a glimmer of hope. Gorrie believed he did not need winter in order to make ice. Gephardt, the artist, believed he could honor that fact by painstakingly cutting 143 slices of bread into the likeness of a man. Both achieved their goals. Why not me?
I carried this clipping in my notebook for years. When I entered my 30s, now as a wife and a mother, I decided to throw myself into a burgeoning new career as a writer — so once again, I needed all the encouragement I could get. I framed the toast portrait and hung it on my wall. The years went on. Divorce, my daughter's teenage years, another career shift — throughout it all, the toast remained in view. When I left a secure job in a law office to start my own tax preparation business with a focus on cannabis companies, my peers had their doubts. But I looked to the toast. The framed portrait of John Gorrie went up on the wall of my new office.
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This career has brought more success and satisfaction than I ever achieved in my earlier working life. My clients are all risk-takers and passionate about their businesses, and we work together every day believing in change and fighting uncertainty. As in most cases, Mom was right.
And if someone can make a portrait out of toast, well, hey, we can do anything.
