There's No Win and No Fail. There's Only Make.
Present Principle 031 is an Ode to Sister Corita Kent
I believe in making things and putting them out. Even when they go sideways. Even when the result has little to do with what I imagined.
Twenty years of making have convinced me of one thing: an imperfect Thing that exists beats a perfect Thing that doesn’t. Every time.
And still, I know the fear. The fear of making a mistake is Resistance’s favorite weapon. I believe it kills more ideas than lack of talent ever could. Most things never see the light of the world because someone was afraid to get them wrong.
So let’s look at the word itself. Mistake comes from the Old Norse mistaka: to take the wrong thing. To take. As if there were a shelf of correct answers somewhere, and you reached for the wrong one.
Making has no shelf. When you make something, there is no right answer waiting that you could miss. There is only the thing that exists now, and the thing you make next.
One person understood this more deeply than almost anyone. She was a nun.
In the 1960s, the art department of a small Catholic women’s college in Los Angeles was run by Sister Corita Kent. She took the loudest language of her time (advertising slogans, supermarket signs, pop songs) and silkscreened it into art about love, hunger, and justice. Her classroom drew visitors like John Cage, Alfred Hitchcock, Buckminster Fuller, and Charles and Ray Eames.
Her class distilled its philosophy into ten rules, hand-lettered and later hung as the official rules of the whole department. Rule 4 says: “Consider everything an experiment.” Rule 5 says “Be self disciplend.” But Rule 6 is the one I would paint on every studio wall:
“Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.”
(A side note that tells you a lot about how history works: the internet mostly credits these rules to John Cage. He loved them, spread them, and Merce Cunningham kept a copy in his dance studio until the day he died. But they came out of Corita’s classroom.)
Corita lived her rule. She made radical pop art as a nun, upset the conservative archbishop of Los Angeles, and after thirty years in the order she left, at fifty, to start over in Boston. There she turned a gas tank into what is often called the largest copyrighted artwork in the world. Her Love stamp sold over 700 million copies. When I talk about courageous Makers, I mean people like her. Maybe I mean her first.
And her rule keeps resurfacing, spoken by people who probably never read it.
Virgil Abloh, lecturing at Harvard in 2017, told the students: “Most hurdles are self-imposed. They literally don’t exist. There is no failure.” He refused perfectionism on principle. He put out early, imperfect work to start the domino that became Off-White and eventually Louis Vuitton. His shortest version of the rule: “The only failure is not to try.”
I know this from my own twenty years of trying. My first hundred tries at almost everything were bad. They were supposed to be. But every wrong version quietly told me what the next one needed. That is the part we forget when we fear mistakes: a mistake is information. It is the most honest tool a maker has, and it only shows up when you make something. Hesitation teaches you nothing.
Still, you could object that all of this is easy for artists. A studio keeps no score. Nobody counts your drafts, nobody publishes your misses in a table. Fair enough. So let’s test the rule in the one world that is built entirely on winning and losing.
Giannis Antetokounmpo, April 2023. His Bucks, the best team of the regular season, have just been knocked out in the first round. A reporter asks if the season was a failure. Giannis asks back: do you get a promotion every year? And was every year without one a failure? Then he points at Michael Jordan. Fifteen seasons, six titles. Were the other nine seasons failures? “There is no failure in sports,” he says.
While writing this, I kept trying to remember who once said that mistakes are just steps upward. I searched everywhere. It was Giannis, in that same answer: steps to success.
A nun in 1968. A designer in 2017. An athlete in 2023. Three worlds, one rule.
If even sports can drop the words win and fail, so can we. The scoreboard asks: did you win? The desk only ever asks: did you make?
Mistakes are not the tax you pay on making. They are the material itself. Steps. Which means the goal is never to avoid them. Make them early. Make them often. Or, as a line in my own notes keeps reminding me: make better mistakes.
What would you start today if nothing you make could be a mistake?
P.S.
Weekend report: a wedding in the French countryside, dancing until dawn, and a Sunday that produced exactly nothing except a run through the fields, two jumps into a cold pool, and a nap on the train back to Paris. The city is in its strange late-July mode now, half empty, half holiday. I’m using the quiet to ship. See you next week.
Worth your time:
⊹ Corita’s full biography, great presentation and videos (Link)
⊹ The Giannis press conference, “There Is No Failure In Sports” (Link)
⊹ Virgil’s Harvard lecture “Insert Complicated Title Here” (Link)
I’m writing a book and framework to help as many people as possible. It’s called Do The Thing. A Modern Maker Manifesto and is now available to pre-order.
If you want to join a supportive group of 267 Modern Makers from all around the world, check out our Present Space. We are meeting in the Consistency Club every two weeks to talk about the bliss and struggles of getting closer to our Favorite Unrealized Projects.
How I work: Every text I write starts with my own train of thought. This one was structured and drafted in dialogue with an AI writing partner, in my voice and under my direction, also because English isn’t my native language. The ideas, stories, and conclusions are mine. I edit, refine, and art direct every piece before publishing, including the imagery, credits, and sources.
