An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

The Win is in the Choosing

There's a quiet radicalism in this idea: the moment you decide to make something—anything—you've already won. Not when you sell it, not when critics praise it, not when it goes viral. The winning happens in the choosing itself.

This cuts against how we usually keep score. We're trained to measure artists by their outcomes: gallery shows, book deals, streaming numbers. But Cooley is pointing at something most creators intuitively know—that the real accomplishment is in showing up to the work, in wrestling with materials and ideas, in refusing to pretend you're something safer. An artist is someone who makes things despite having no guarantee they'll matter to anyone else. That's the whole ballgame right there.

The sneaky part? This doesn't mean anything you make is automatically good. It means the struggle itself—the commitment to creating rather than consuming, to risking failure rather than playing it safe—is where the success lives. It's permission to stop waiting until you're "good enough" to call yourself an artist. You become one by acting like one, by taking seriously the small and strange things only you can make.