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The Terrible Creative is a storytelling podcast for photographers, designers, and creative professionals working through the parts of the creative process no gear review or business course ever covers.
Each episode is 30 to 40 minutes. Solo. Story-driven. Built around mental health, artistic identity, and what honest work costs in a career rewarding performance over truth.
This is not a photography podcast about cameras, presets, or client strategy. This is a podcast about the inner experience of being a creative professional, made for the mid-career photographer or designer who has mastered the technical side but lost the thread.
Hosted by Patrick Fore, commercial photographer, author, and former lead photographer and brand designer for Taylor Guitars. His work has appeared globally for clients like Nike, Petco, and Verizon. He built this show because none of the podcasts he found addressed the real problem.
If you are a photographer or creative professional who feels competent on the outside and quietly lost on the inside, you are a Terrible Creative. This is your podcast.
69 - We’ll See
The quiet anxiety of creative marketing, the myth of absolute certainty, and why an empty inbox isn’t an indictment of your talent.
I was at an event a couple days ago, there were several photographers there. APA event. (American Photographic Artists) We were touring a local artists studio in La Mesa, California.
It was a small group, and some of the attendees were commercial shooters like me. One of the photographers and I started talking about how things are going with her business, if she’s busy.
She said she’s doing a lot of personal work, that her creative cup is full. But she needs more paid client work.
I asked her about that, how she’s approaching it. What her strategy is.
She told me that she’s been “cold pitching like crazy, sending emails every day to prospective clients.”
I then asked her just a basic follow up question, how’s it going? Any response?
"We'll see." She said,
I nodded. Said something forgettable. The group started moving toward the next room.
We’ll see.
It’s crazy how much of our livelihoods are based on this notion of “we’ll see”
I mean think about it. We as humans can only do so much. We can’t control whether people will respond the way we want them to.
So much in life lives in the “We’ll see”
If I ask the girl for her number, will she give it to me?
We’ll see.
If I apply for this job, will I get an interview?
We’ll see.
If I take this medicine will my body respond well to it?
We’ll see.
So much of life and our careers specifically are rolls of dice.
So for us, two humans, two photographers in San Diego, in the same market trying to survive another day, when she said, “We’ll see” I felt it, I understood what it meant.
Well…
My name is Patrick Fore, and this is The Terrible Creative—honest conversations about creativity, identity, and finding your voice. Today is Episode 69. I'm calling it 'We'll See.' The quiet anxiety of creative marketing, the myth of absolute certainty, and why an empty inbox isn’t an indictment of your talent.
So, If you look back through the archive of this show, one thing you will notice is that I rarely talk about marketing. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about marketing actually, I avoid it, mostly because I don’t feel like I have figured it out myself.
But I also know it’s the exact topic almost every professional creative person I talk to has by far the most questions around right now. And those conversations aren't loud or aggressive. They are quiet. They are confused, and they are deeply frustrated. And they all center around the question of where and how to find work.
So today, we are going there. We’re talking about marketing. But consider this a warning: there are no silver bullets in this conversation. It’s not even really about strategy. It lives in that uncomfortable gap between the confidence we’re forced to project and the deep uncertainty we actually feel.
And if you are sitting out there right now feeling confused, or frustrated, or trapped in that exhausting headspace where you think the reason people aren't calling is because your work just isn't good enough—this episode is for you.
If this is your first time here, welcome. Jump around—the episodes are in no particular order. The inbox is always open for questions, thoughts, or unfiltered hate mail. I read every single one. The link is right there in the show notes.
Let’s get into it.
You know, in that artists studio, at that APA event, I didn't have a smart response for her when she said, “We’ll See”. I had a feeling, and it wasn't one feeling. It was three at once, stacked on top of each other like a shitty film exposure.
Part of me was skeptical. Fifty cold pitches in this market, in 2026, with everyone's inbox already drowning.
Part of me was rooting for her, actually rooting, the kind of hope you feel for someone when you remember what it's like to send something into the dark abyss and wait.
And part of me, the part I like least, was running her numbers against mine. My own pitches. My own silence. My own ego, my own shitty cynical attitude of that never worked for me, quietly measuring her hustle against my history, like that has anything to do with anything.
That third part is the one that scares me a little.
And once she said “we’ll see”, I started hearing it everywhere. Not the words. The shape of it. The essence of “we’ll see” - how it shapes so much of we do.
The confident captions. The "here's my content strategy" posts. The “$299 course launches with the countdown timers. Underneath almost all of it, if you stripped the certainty off, you'd find the same two words she gave me.
We'll see.
You know, I've got my own version too. Hope dressed up as a confident marketing strategy - SEO. AI search. The whole architecture I built my visibility on for years. It's working right now, today, this week. Whether it's working in eighteen months, when AI answers questions instead of sending people to websites, I don't know. Nobody does. I'm not panicking about it. But if I'm honest, it's a big giant “we'll see” too.
Cold pitches. SEO. A course launch. A new productized service.A newsletter. A new platform. A career pivot you haven't told anyone about yet. Different bets. Same chip on the same table.
I want us all to take a trip. And this trip isn’t going to be exciting or interesting. It’s a trip through my email inbox. I will say, this could be your email inbox. It could be your clients. Everyone has a different version of this.
For me it’s this…
Podcast bookers. Retouchers. People who do "AI-powered lead generation" for photographers, which is its own kind of joke I don't have time for today. Guys trying to sell me leads. Guys trying to sell me app design. UX design. People trying to do my bookkeeping. People trying to sell me a course on how to market or how to retouch or how to build a website that converts. Or ironically, and a little meta, how to write cold emails that convert.
All there, filling up our promotions and updates mailboxes. Most of these emails get a glance and a delete. Most don’t even get an open, I just glance at the subject line.
Now, I think this is worth saying. I’m not deleting or not even opening these emails because the person is bad at what they do. I genuinely don't know if they are. I delete because the email doesn't tell me anything true, and I can feel that in about four seconds.
They know that, I know, it’s a numbers game, that if I just blanket enough people, eventually one person might need what I do.
And that takes confidence, you know? Or desperation, or a combination of the two.
I want to talk about confidence specifically for a moment because I think it’s important to the conversation here. And not just confidence, I want to take it a step further, certainty.
One lesson that I’ve tried to embed into my daughter Lucy is to always remain extremely skeptical of anyone with certainty. We all know who I’m talking about right? Those guys who sell the proverbial snake oil to fix all their ailments and woes. The guys who have all the answers to all the mysteries of the cosmos.
Most of the time they are just trying to sell you something, or they are talking out of their ass.
The photography, creative, and really business world as a whole is full of people with tremendous confidence and certainty about things they couldn’t possibly know or understand or could guarantee.
And here's the thing about confidence, the kind that comes blasting through a cold email or a webinar funnel or from a man with a microphone and a podcast. These people who are most certain about something complicated are usually one of three things.
They're selling you something, and certainty is the product, even when the product is supposedly their own expertise.
Or they're new enough that their strategy hasn't met its first real failure yet, so of course it sounds bulletproof, it hasn't been shot at.
Or, rarely, they're one of the few people who got lucky in a way that looks like skill from the outside, and they've built a whole identity on a result they can't actually reproduce.
Usually though, it’s the first one.
I don't say that with contempt or as a judgment on people who fall for it. I say it because I used to think confidence was a sign someone had figured something out. I’ve bought the courses, I’ve taken the training. I’ve made the mistake thinking that their certainty in their system could lead me to my success.
And I was wrong.
Now I see through it. They created a product around a strategy that worked for them or in a specific use case and now they are parlaying that success into a package that you can buy for 3 easy payments of $499.
The people who I trust most in this industry, aren’t the slick guys selling a strategy wich confidence and certainty, the people I trust most talk about worked for them, understand that it’s complicated and that they don’t know what they don’t know. They are willing to share the knowledge that they have, but have no need to sell you anything. It’s more sharing knowledge than selling a miracle cure.
I want to tell you about a camera, specifically a camera that I sold to a very nice man standing on my porch on a sunny San Diego Saturday morning.
The camera was my backup Canon R5.. Money was tight. Honestly, tight here is an understatement. Tight means we probably shouldn’t get takeout thai food this week and maybe we should just eat the food in our cupboard.
No, this was the kind of tight where the numbers in the spreadsheet are all in red. And the money needed to make basic expenses don’t work. The kind of tight where no matter how hard you work the numbers, it still comes up short.
So I listed it on Facebook Marketplace myself. Took the photos. Wrote the description. Some and guy drove over, and I stood on my front porch and handed him a camera that had been with me on shoots I was proud of, shoots that mattered, and I walked him through how to use it like I was handing off a rental car. Proudfully explaining that it had always been in metal cage. How I had it cleaned and looked over by Canon.
My hand didn't want to let go. It felt like I was selling a friend. It was a weird experience.
But I let go anyway. I boxed it up for him, took his payment and he drove away.
And if I’m being honest, the most painful part of that whole transactions wasn really about the camera itself. I knew I could and would get another one eventually. What it felt like, standing there, was an indictment. Of my work ethic. My strategy. My nerve. Like the universe had looked at my whole portfolio and said, not good enough, and sent a guy in a Honda to collect the evidence of my crime.
It still stings a little. I'm not going to pretend it doesn't.
I mean after all, photographers are supposed to collect gear, not sell them to make rent. It felt like I had failed, that somewhere along the way I didn’t work hard enough. That if I would have sent the cold emails that maybe I would have found the client that would prevent me from standing on my porch, handing a man my camera so I could balance the books.
I want to talk about marketing for a few minutes, because I know for a lot of us, marketing is THE question of our business. It’s not a question, like where should we go for lunch or should I use the 85mm prime or the 24.-70. It’s THE question that keeps us up at night and we think about when we’re with our families getting gelato on a Sunday afternoon.
So here's the thing I need to say to you directly, because I needed someone to say it to me back then and nobody did.
If your marketing isn't working. If your strategy feels unclear. If the leads aren't coming in at the rate you need, the rate that actually pays your bills, that can have nothing to do with the quality of your work. Nothing to do with you as a person.
I want to repeat and underscore this because some of you weren’t listening.
Here me, if leads aren’t coming, if your marketing doesn’t seem to be working, if your strategy isn’t connecting with the type of clients you need to feel successful - that can have NOTHING to do with the quality of your work and it isn’t an indictment on you as a person.
Some of you just need to pause and sit with that for a moment, because I know for me, thats what I feel like constantly. That because the emails aren’t coming or the phone is quiet that means that I’m a shitty photographer and a shitty husband and a shitty dad and a shitty human.
You know, and I know thats bullshit. It doesn’t feel like bullshit, but it is.
The reality is that it might be the algorithm shifted three weeks ago and nobody told you because nobody tells you. It might be that the three companies who'd have hired you are mid layoff and quietly terrified themselves. It might be that AI search ate the exact kind of query that used to land on your website, and the people looking for you can't find the road anymore. It might be because a decision was made by old men in suits 2000 miles away in Washington. It might be a hundred things, stacked, invisible, that have nothing to do with your talent and everything to do with weather.
You can't control the weather. You can only decide what you do while you're standing in it.
Okay, now that I said that, I need to give you some tough love here. And you might be confused, because I just built you up and told you it might not be your fault.
But for some of you, and I know this because I’ve seen it, you’re not helping your situation.
Some of you haven’t updated your websites in a year.
Some of you haven’t sent a cold pitch email, ever.
Some of you haven’t posted on social media in 6 months.
Some of you haven’t done a personal shoot, ever.
Some of you have (if you’re a photographer) have images on your portfolio that shouldn't be there. Images that aren’t up to quality the market demands.
Some of you are frustrated, and confused, and broke but you haven’t done anything that warrants a, “we’ll see” in two years.
You sit back and want the universe to bring you jobs, you live on a hope and wish and a prayer without doing the work to give the universe something to work with.
I know I’m talking to some of you here.
But it’s okay, it’s fixable. The decisions that you have been making don’t have to dictate the decisions that you can make right now. The present that you create now, will affect the future that you want to create tomorrow. This isn’t fortune cookie wisdom, it’s true. If you keep doing the same things over and over, thats insanity, that isn’t strategy.
Okay so, If you can indulge me for a minute, I want to get a little woo-woo spiritual crazy person for a second. Don’t worry i’m not going to ask you to sage your camera gear or rub essential oils on your mac.
I want to talk about taking a step back, taking a breath, and understanding that there are powers at work that are beyond our control and we have to submit to that lack control in our lives and in our business.
I talk about this story in my book, but when I left my corporate job in 2022, I spent the first 6 months at my Mac, hustling for work. Grinding away on my website, on LinkedIn, posting to Instagram. I would sit at my desk for 8-10-12 hours a day working. And looking back, I don’t even remember working on what specifically.
But there was a moment, on a random thursday, I still remember it. I gave up. I pushed my desk chair away from my desk and stood up, and walked outside and I laid in our hammock. For a while I was just throwing the ball for my dog, but then after a while I found myself just looking up at the bright blue sky and I remember I just, kinda surrendered. Not in a weird, ritual kind of way, I remember I just remember saying to myself, “whatever, I give up.”
I eventually fell asleep with the warmth of the sun on my face. When I wokeup an hour or so later, fished out my phone that I was now laying on and checked my email.
I got a lead for a big job. Not a headshot, but an actual production job that paid 5 digits. I remember looking at my phone, still in the hammock and something finally clicked.
The universe is still working even though I’m not. That my stress and worry has nothing to do with whether clients will book me or not. More importantly though, it helped me realize that I am not in control.
And thats the thing about marketing that they don’t tell you.
All of it, I don’t care how much science you have or data can analyze, a lot of it is build on “we’ll see”.
Sure there are things we can do, there are principles we can follow, there are solid marketing strategies, I’m not saying that there aren’t. But what I am saying is that sometimes, you can do all the right things, follow allt he best advice and your inbox is still filled with spam.
And that doesn’t mean you’re shit at what you do, it just means that for some reason, some weird, mysterious, reason beyond your control or my control that there isn’t a lead for you.
And thats the paradox of this whole thing right. The thing that I have no idea why or how it works, but sometimes be best thing that I can do for my business, is to step away from my mac, is just go take my dog Loki for a walk or take a nap on a Tuesday afternoon or watch a movie on a Thursday morning because really, because spending that time posting another thing on LinkedIn, might be just as valuable as stepping back, surrendering to a power that is beyond your control and learn to control the things that you can control.
But there's a trust under that, and it's quieter than confidence. Not trust that everything works out. Trust that if you do good work, if you're positioned honestly, if you're someone people actually want to deal with, the emails come. Eventually. Sometimes. We'll see.
And I get it, "we'll see" doesn't pay the mortgage. It doesn't cover the vet bill when your cat eats something he shouldn't, or the grocery total that makes you do math in you cringe and panic a little at checkout line. Sometimes you do what's necessary. You sell the camera. You take the shitty low paying job you didn't love and never tell anyone about it. You get through the week, the month, the year. You survive. You keep going. You keep building.
And sometimes you go take a nap in your yard instead of posting, pitching or panicking.
Both of those are true on the same day, and neither one cancels the other out.
So, going back to my friend who is going to send all those pitches. Here is my hope for her, I hope when tomorrow comes and she sends pitch number fifty-one. I hope someone writes back, I hope ten write back. I really do. But if nobody does, for a while atleast, I hope she hears this, and I hope it lands differently than it would have this morning.
So yeah, we’ll see…we’ll see what tomorrow brings. We’ll see what the inbox brings us next week.
Who knows, you know? I sure don’t. You don’t. But hey, we’re in this together.
I think, We'll see might be the most honest thing anyone in this business can say right now.
So, until next week..
Stay curious. Stay courageous. Stay terrible.