Puzzles and perseverance: why a hard board is worth finishing

Robert and Elizabeth Bjork coined the term desirable difficulties for a counter-intuitive family of findings: some conditions that slow learning down and make it feel harder produce better long-term retention and transfer. Spacing practice out instead of massing it, mixing different kinds of problems, testing yourself instead of rereading, and generating an answer instead of being handed one all feel less efficient at the time and tend to work better later.

In their 2020 overview they stress the word desirable. A difficulty helps only if the learner can respond to it successfully. A problem far beyond you is not a desirable difficulty; it is a wall. The sweet spot is a challenge that takes real effort and is still within reach.

For a puzzle player the translation is simple. A board that makes you think for several minutes, try three ideas and discard two is doing what desirable difficulties describe. A board that has you guessing at random for twenty minutes is not; it has stopped giving you anything to respond to.

Sources1Source 1Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (2020). Desirable difficulties in theory and practice. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 9(4), 475–479.

Difficulty feels bad partly because we judge our learning by our performance in the moment. Nicholas Soderstrom and Robert Bjork reviewed decades of research showing that the two can come apart. Learning can happen without any visible change in performance, and conditions that boost performance during practice can fail to produce lasting learning. People regularly misread smooth, easy practice as a sign that they are learning well.

On a puzzle board this is freeing. The minutes you spend stuck, trying approaches that do not work, are not wasted just because the board stays unsolved. You are mapping which moves lead nowhere and why, and that map is part of what makes the next hard board feel easier.

Sources2Source 2Soderstrom, N. C., & Bjork, R. A. (2015). Learning versus performance: An integrative review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 176–199.

Education research has tested a sharper version of the idea. In productive failure, developed by Manu Kapur, students attempt problems before they have been taught how to solve them, usually fail, and then receive instruction. A 2021 meta-analysis by Tanmay Sinha and Kapur pooled 53 studies and found a moderate advantage for problem solving first over instruction first, and a larger one when the design followed productive failure principles closely.

The same analysis found limits worth knowing. For younger children, roughly second to fifth grade, and for general skills that are not tied to a subject, instruction first came out ahead. Struggle is not automatically good. It works when learners have enough to go on, and when what comes afterwards helps them make sense of what they tried.

Puzzles have a built-in version of that second step. When you finally find the solution to a board you fought with, your failed attempts suddenly make sense. You can see why each one fell short, and that is the moment the struggle turns into understanding.

Sources3Source 3Sinha, T., & Kapur, M. (2021). When problem solving followed by instruction works: Evidence for productive failure. Review of Educational Research, 91(5), 761–798.

Effort is usually treated as a cost, something people avoid when they can. Michael Inzlicht, Amitai Shenhav and Christopher Olivola reviewed the evidence that it is also a source of value: the same outcome can feel more rewarding when it took effort, and people sometimes choose things precisely because they are hard. They call this the effort paradox.

There is a condition attached, and it gives this article its title. Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely found that people valued things they had made themselves, from IKEA boxes to origami to Lego sets, more highly than they otherwise would. But the effect disappeared when people failed to finish, or built something and then took it apart. Labour led to love only when the labour ended in completion.

That is the case for finishing a hard board rather than abandoning it at eighty per cent. The satisfaction of a hard clear is real, and it seems to depend on the clear.

Sources4Source 4Inzlicht, M., Shenhav, A., & Olivola, C. Y. (2018). The effort paradox: Effort is both costly and valued. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(4), 337–349.5Source 5Norton, M. I., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2012). The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 453–460.

Perseverance has been popularised as grit, and that idea deserves some care. Marcus Credé and colleagues pooled 88 samples covering more than 66,000 people and found that grit was only moderately related to performance and very strongly related to conscientiousness, a long-established personality trait. Of grit’s two parts, perseverance of effort did better than consistency of interest. Sticking with things helps; it is just not a magic trait.

The practical version is modest. Stay with a hard board past the first flush of frustration. When you notice you are repeating yourself, step away rather than quit. Use the tools the game gives you to learn from your errors, which is what undo is for. And if a board really is beyond you today, leave it for another day; a desirable difficulty has to be one you can meet.

OutBrick is designed so that persevering does not cost much. There is no clock, the first undo on every board is free, and a life goes only when an attempt ends without a clear, never for opening or clearing a board; the full terms are in the fair-play ledger on the home page. All 2,000 boards were cleared by a solver before release, so a board that looks impossible does have a way through. The daily board is a good place to practise: it stays the same all day, so if it resists at breakfast, it will still be waiting later.

Sources6Source 6Credé, M., Tynan, M. C., & Harms, P. D. (2017). Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), 492–511.