(2025-11-10) Barnett Lucky Ones

Olivia Barnett: Lucky Ones. Late last night, after a whole day of hacking away on a script to make a collection of NFTs, I stopped and took a long look at them, turned to Blaine and said: “These look silly.”

I was frustrated. I had spent all day tweaking a script (which is a single file of code that can be run manually) to run through a series of assets I had collected, randomly choose combinations of them, and generate tons and tons of unique images for me. Kind of like a slot machine. The script was working, in that it was generating images with all the attributes I had defined, but the overall look was… lacking

I began thinking out loud to Blaine, running through plans on how we could fix them. But none of my ideas had the requisite excitement behind them

Suddenly, Blaine pulled my computer over and opened up a pixelation tool online. He threw one of the generated images in there and we both looked at the output and cocked our heads. It was kind of cool. What had looked a bit cartoonish now looked retro — like an old computer game. The idea isn’t new — a lot of NFT projects go the pixelated route

This morning, as we walked to a coffee shop to continue working, we talked about the seeming change in our fortunes just by that snap idea to pixelate. I wondered how long it would have taken me to come up with such an idea in the mood I was in at the time. I think a long time, because I was in a stubborn rut. And I wondered, how had Blaine been struck by inspiration and I hadn’t? Why couldn’t I have seen this path forward? (un-stuck)

I recalled then a study I once saw. It was about luck — or our perceived “luckiness.”

participants were given a newspaper and asked to count the number of pictures it contained. As it turns out, the self-described unlucky participants often set about diligently counting each image in the newspaper. And the lucky ones? They were much more likely to notice that on page two of this newspaper, in giant bold letters ran the headline: “Stop counting, there are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” The average time for an unlucky participant to finish the task was 2 minutes, while the lucky ones completed the assignment generally in seconds.

I remember reading about this study and thinking to myself: Jesus, I am definitely one of the unlucky ones! I would 100% have sat there and counted photographs in a newspaper as fast as I could. I love a good brute force, roll your sleeves up, grin and bear it path. And when I say I love it, I mean I just tend to go this route. I actually don’t enjoy it, nor do I think it serves me.

Openness and curiosity can lead to this feeling that you are innately “lucky.” My learning for today is that moments of perceived failure are going to happen all the time this year. Pushing myself to remain optimistic and curious in the face of these dips is what will open new paths, encourage inspiration, and let me also be one of the lucky ones.