I was bad at Sudoku because I never tried

A few months ago I started playing Sudoku on LinkedIn. That little game they hide between job listings and connection requests.

My first few attempts were rough. We're talking 25 to 35 minutes to finish one puzzle. I felt embarrassed about it but also, strangely, I couldn't stop. Something about finishing it, even badly, made me want to come back the next day and try again. So I did. Every day for about two weeks.

I got a little faster. Somewhere from 35 minutes down to maybe 20. But I was still just guessing. Filling in numbers, getting stuck, backtracking, guessing again. It worked, sort of, but it was exhausting.

Then my husband saw me playing.

He sat down and watched for a minute and then said something that completely changed everything: "You know there are rules to this, right? No number can repeat in the same box, the same row, or the same column."

That was it. That was the whole thing I had been missing.

I knew Sudoku was a puzzle. I did not know it had logic behind it. I thought it was pattern recognition through trial and error, like memorizing the shape of a maze. I had no idea you could reason your way to the answer.

It took me another week and a half to really internalize it, to stop defaulting to guessing and start trusting the rules. But once it clicked? I went from 20 minutes down to 10. On the same puzzle I had been white-knuckling through for weeks.

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And then I got a little sad.

Because I remembered high school. I remembered everyone in my class playing Sudoku on paper, little printed grids passed around the classroom, kids huddled in corners working through them. It was everywhere.

And I never tried. Not once. I looked at those grids and thought: that's not for me. I'm not good with numbers. I'm not smart enough for that.

I didn't ask anyone how it worked. I didn't even let myself be curious about it. I had already decided the answer before I asked the question. And that decision, that quiet assumption I made about myself at 15 or 16, followed me for years. Every time someone mentioned numbers or logic or puzzles, I had this ready-made explanation: I'm just not that kind of person.

But here's the thing about Sudoku: it has nothing to do with being good at math. It's about following a rule. A simple, learnable rule. I was keeping myself out of something that I could have done all along.

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I think about how different it might have been if I had just asked someone to show me. One person, five minutes, explaining what my husband explained to me in thirty seconds. That might have been all it took. And maybe I would have carried a different story about myself into adulthood.

So if you're anything like past me: please ask the question. The one you're holding back because you think it sounds too basic, or because you don't want to look like you don't know. There is no such thing as a noob question. There is only the question you asked and the one you didn't.

You don't get to know what you're capable of until you try. And you don't have to figure it out alone.

Show up. Be curious. Ask.