Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Terrible Creative is a storytelling podcast for photographers, designers, and creative humans trying to stay honest in a world that rewards pretending
63 - The Cost of Getting Good
Hey friends, just a note before we get started. Two things.
1. My book, ‘Lessons From A Terrible Photographer’ is available now on Amazon and everywhere else where you buy books online I reckon. It’s available worldwide in hardcover, paperback and ebook. The audio book is on the way, and if you are listening to this June 2026 on, it should be available now. Other thing of note: If you purchased the collectors box this past December, you’ll be getting an email pretty soon with a bunch of good stuff including the ebook, a couple of extra chapters. Once the audio book comes out, you’ll get that too.
2. I’m working through some teeth issues right now. I’m in and out of pain, it sucks. So if I sound a little weird this episode, that's probably why. My wife told me to take the week off. Never. We’re going to power through this together.
Okay, so that's it from me, let’s get into it.
The house smells like money pretending to be nature.
The house smells like crushed rosemary and damp cedar—that botanical, high-end pharmacy scent, but really though, it just smelled like money.
The smell was layered over the metallic hum of a professional HVAC system. Underneath that, the ozone from the strobe packs, the scorched-sugar smell of an espresso machine nobody is really using, and the chemical floral of a makeup artist's hairspray. This is a house where no one ever uses the main kitchen, the oven is too clean, it’s more for show. Where the design wasn’t made for comfort, but more for styling.
And the light doesn't need much help. Thre are floor-to-ceiling windows which pull in the Pacific’s bright glow, bouncing it off the water, flooding the interior with something white and clinical and just short of cruel. The limestone floors hold long rectangular blocks of it. The dust stirred up by the assistants hauling C-stands across the room turns gold in it. Temporarily architectural.
There are people in this room whose t-shirts cost two hundred dollars. There is a sofa that feels like a very expensive cloud that has been told to keep its feelings to itself. There is a founder, standing near the kitchen island, watching his product get photographed exactly the way he always imagined it would be.
He is having the best day of his professional life.
And I am counting down to a Diet Dr Pepper from McDonald's. A stupid ritual I have after every shoot.
Not because the work was bad. The work was good. Technically precise, efficiently executed, delivered exactly what the brief asked for.
But somewhere between setup two and lunch, I stopped feeling anything except the performance of feeling something. The mask that goes on with the equipment. The version of me that knows how to keep energy in the room, keep the talent loose, keep the client feeling like everything is fine.
Why does that keep happening? Not on bad jobs. On the good ones.
My name is Patrick Fore, and this is The Terrible Creative — honest conversations about creativity, identity, and what it costs to keep showing up. This is Episode 63. I'm calling it "The Cost of Getting Good."
If this is your first episode, start anywhere. No particular order. Email is always open — link is in the show notes. I respond to everything.
So, I've left a lot of rooms.
First job was at a newspaper in Iowa. Design work. Page layouts, local business ads, the unglamorous infrastructure of a regional paper. Seven-fifty an hour. And I was already trying to use negative space the way Volkswagen used it. My boss would tell me to make things bigger. I would point to print ads and say they didn't need to fill the page.
She did not enjoy that.
But I was good at it. Good enough that the publisher noticed. Good enough that I ended up designing for the VPs instead of the team. I was not popular. I had no interest in becoming them. I had my own agenda. And from my employer's perspective, that agenda was actually a benefit — they got better work than they expected, because I cared more than I should have. More than the seven-fifty warranted.
Then the ceiling appeared. Nothing left to fix. Nothing left to learn. Just maintenance. And then, honestly — restlessness, boredom, sloppiness, bitterness. Then the door.
Designer. Art director. Taylor Guitars, overseeing photography, learning what it means to make images at a level that actually costs something. Then out. The exits blur together from this distance, but the pattern doesn't.
It was 2013 in Houston, a city that — if you've ever been there in August — feels less like a metropolitan hub and more like being trapped inside a giant, warm, damp sock.
I had recently talked my way into a job as a Senior Level Designer. And when I say "talked my way in," I mean I had performed a series of linguistic acrobatics that convinced a group of strangers I was a man who understood the secret life of stage lights and scenic construction. In reality, I was a man with a portfolio that looked like a very convincing lie and enough confidence to bridge the gap between "I think I can build that" and "oh god, I've actually built it."
And for a while, it was wonderful. The kind of work where the sun goes down without asking your permission, and you're fine with it.
But then, the world started to notice. I got an invitation to speak at a conference in Dallas. A breakout session — which is the conference world's way of saying you're the opening act — but I was honored. I felt like a real person with a real career.
So I went to tell my boss.
Now, you have to understand this man's office. It was a room designed by someone who had seen a picture of creativity in a magazine and decided to recreate it on a questionable budget. There was a giant glass wall meant for his genius ideas, though at the time it mostly featured a few meeting dates and some grocery-list-style notes. Real visionary stuff.
He sat in an orange chair. The kind of chair that looks like it belongs in a design museum, all rounded edges and bold color, the sort of thing that photographs beautifully and feels, upon sitting, like being cradled by a very angry Transformer. Across from him, two turquoise leather seats. Black shag carpet on the floor. The whole room was a mood board for a man who needed you to know he was creative before you noticed anything else.
I sat down in a white director's chair against the wall. The kind that suggests you're about to say "action." In this case I was only about to say "I've been invited to Dallas."
He didn't look at me. He looked at the glass wall.
No congratulations. Not even a "that's nice, Patrick." Instead, a lecture on divided focus. My role was to serve the brand, not build my own name. He spoke with the hushed, urgent tone of a man protecting a kingdom that was actually just a black shag carpet and a blank glass wall.
I sat there, being poked by the director's chair, and it hit me. He wasn't my boss in that moment. He was a jealous girlfriend.
I walked back to my desk.
Something inside the Senior Level Designer just clicked off.
The mask was still on. The person behind it had already checked out of Houston.
[PAUSE - 3 seconds]
I didn't quit that day. I lasted another six months before a job in Washington came up and I took it. But I wouldn't have even looked. Wouldn't have taken the call. If he'd walked out of that office and said good job, you're representing this team well, go do it — I'd have stayed. I was making him look good. I'd talked my way into his organization and delivered more than the job description asked for. The conference was evidence of that.
When he couldn't see it, I stopped being able to see myself there.
I've had a lot of those moments. The ceiling doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes it just looks like your boss's face when something good happens to you.
I used to tell that story as ambition. As always chasing something bigger. That version is true, but it's incomplete.
I'm really good at my job. I'm a terrible employee.
[PAUSE - 3 seconds]
There's a concept in organizational psychology that describes what happens to high performers over time. Early success in a specific skill creates a feedback loop. You get good. The world confirms you belong there. The confirmation makes you better. The better you get, the more the world needs you exactly where you are.
Robert Berglas, a psychologist who studied high performers, noticed a pattern. People who reach a certain level in their field often start to work against themselves. When the world confirms you belong in a specific box, that box starts to feel like a coffin. Self-handicapping becomes the only exit that feels available.
So... back in 1853, Herman Melville wrote this short story called Bartleby, the Scrivner. And Bartleby is basically the 19th-century version of a guy who is really good at his job.
He’s a copyist in a law office on Wall Street. And his whole life is just... copying. He’s meticulous. He’s reliable. He’s exactly the kind of person you’d want on your team. But then one day, his boss asks him to do this totally routine thing—just some proofreading—and Bartleby looks at him and says, 'I would prefer not to.'
And the weird thing is, he doesn't leave. He doesn't go find another job. He just stays there, in the office, but he’s... done. He just stops.
And what Melville is getting at—the thing that makes the story so deeply uncomfortable—is that Bartleby didn't have a 'self' to go back to. He’d been a copyist for so long that he’d actually become the copy. The tragedy isn't the refusal. It’s that when he finally stopped the performance, he realized there was no one left behind the mask.
So here's what that looks like when you're a freelancer.
You're not just good at your craft. You're dependable. You show up. You deliver clean files, on time, without drama. You manage the room, manage the client, manage the energy. And that combination — skill plus reliability — has a dollar value attached to it now. Clients budget for it. They schedule around it.
I think what I'm describing is less a career and more a lease. And the rent is your attention. You keep signing it because you're good at the work, but also because you've forgotten how to be anyone else. You're standing in rooms where everyone knows exactly what you're capable of, and that confirmation — that's addictive. The alternative requires imagining yourself as someone the market hasn't confirmed yet. After years of confirmation, that's a genuinely terrifying place to stand.
The client in Carlsbad had the best day. His product, the thing he'd poured everything into, was finally being shown the way he'd always pictured it. He was right to be stoked. I was right to give him everything I had.
But when I got home — coat still on, keys still in hand — my phone lit up. The client. Asking when he could see proofs. Telling me how much he'd enjoyed the day.
[PAUSE - 4 seconds]
There's a specific kind of loneliness that only happens when you're being applauded for a version of yourself you've already outgrown.
[PAUSE - 4 seconds]
I put the phone face-down on the couch.
There's a version of professional success that looks, from the outside, like everything working. Busy, capable, respected, in demand. And from the inside feels like wearing a costume you can't take off. Doing a matinee and an evening performance of the same show. Waiting for the moment you can finally stop being good at it long enough to remember if you still like it.
You know, I called this show, from the beginning The Terrible Photographer. Now it's The Terrible Creative. And I've given a version of the story behind that name before — the anti-guru thing, the refusal to perform expertise, the middle finger to the industry's obsession with looking polished.
All of that is true.
But I had a conversation recently with another photographer. He told me — gently, but with the kind of honesty that leaves a mark — that I needed to talk better about myself. That the self-deprecation was a wall.
And he was right, I will admit.
I do throw myself and my work under the bus ≈more than I should. I’m sure it get’s annoying. Like a shtik thats past it’s expiration date. But really though, it’s a deep embedded way of survival. In that moments, or any moment like that, I validate and then redirect. Thats my approach too. “Yeah, you’re probably write…oh by the way hows your kid doing? I asked. I’m like a ninja at avoiding the blows of honest confrontation about my shitty self worth.
Because look…and I feel like I’ve said this before on the podcast.
If I call my work terrible before you do, I win. I've occupied the high ground of my own failure. It's a preemptive strike against a rejection I've been expecting since I was young enough to care what people thought about the things I made. If I get there first, you can't hurt me with it.
The word "Terrible" in the title of this show isn't just a brand choice. If I'm honest — and that's supposed to be the whole point of this show — it's also a bunker. A room you can't reach.
T.S. Eliot wrote a man so aware of how he might be perceived that he never acts at all. He asks "do I dare disturb the universe?" The answer is always no. The ability is there. The hunger is there. Being seen and found wanting is more than he can carry. So he gets there first. Every time. He measures out his life with coffee spoons and calls it living.
[THE WE TRANSITION]
So. We do this.
Creatives who've been in long enough to get good, but not long enough to stop being afraid. We build entire identities around our own mediocrity. Not because we believe it. Because believing it is cheaper than being wrong about our own potential in public.
The competence trap isn't just getting stuck in something you're good at. It's: I got good, I built walls around the good thing to protect it, and now the walls are what everybody sees. The work is somewhere inside. The walls are the brand.
I don’t have a happy ending for you. No tidy resolution where the music swells and I walk off into the sunset, finally 'healed.'
I still lead with the self-deprecation. I still hide in the bunker of my own mediocrity because it’s a hell of a lot safer than standing in the light. Even now, on the sets I love, with clients who actually respect me, I can feel the mask sliding into place before I’ve even put the car in park.
For a long time, I told myself that calling this show 'Terrible' was a brand choice. A clever little bit of anti-marketing.
That was a lie.
I called it 'Terrible' because it’s an insurance policy. If I tell you the work is garbage before you have a chance to see it, I’ve already won. I’ve occupied the gutter so you can’t kick me off the curb. It’s not humility. It’s risk management. It’s a preemptive strike against a rejection I’ve been dreading since I was sixteen.
And that’s the real tragedy of getting good. You build these elaborate, high-gloss walls to protect the 'creative spirit,' and you wake up one day and realize the walls are the only thing people are paying for. You aren't an artist anymore. You’re a high-functioning ghost, haunting your own career.
The creatives I actually give a damn about—the ones who haven't been hollowed out by the machine—are the ones willing to be absolute, pathetic amateurs at something new. They’d rather be bleeding in the dirt of a fresh failure than sitting on a throne of 'Good Enough.'
The competence trap is a lease you sign every morning. You put on the uniform. You show up for the matinee. You give them exactly what they paid for, and you keep the change.
But you know the difference. You know the difference between the actual smell of a fire and the clinical, synthetic stage effect. You’ve felt the engine finally catch—that deep, visceral hum of momentum—just as clearly as you’ve felt the hollow, pathetic whirring of a career that's just spinning its wheels in the dirt.
The mask is in your bag right now. You know exactly what it’s made of. You know exactly how much it weighs.
The question isn't whether you're good enough to do the work. You’ve already proven you can deliver the brief. The question is whether you can live with the guy staring back at you in the rearview mirror on the drive home.
Stay curious. Stay courageous.
Stay terrible.