Play teaches experimentation because failure has fewer consequences.

In play, the stakes are deliberately lowered, and that is not a weakness of play but its entire function. When getting it wrong costs almost nothing, you will try the strange approach, the risky move, the thing you would never attempt if the outcome mattered. That is where genuine learning happens, because you get to gather information that caution would have kept from you.

Where you are stuck, ask what a low-stakes version of the problem would look like. A draft nobody reads, a prototype that is allowed to fail, a rehearsal with no audience. Give yourself a stretch where the explicit rule is that the result does not count, and see what you attempt there.