If we filter out the pep tone, it is doing something useful: framing.

Problem framing will always be important.

Framing adjusts how big of problem-solving guns we bring out at the gate (modern or hobby cryptography?), and how to interpret intermediate failures.

For simple but unsolved problems, we expect lots of hard failures, but that each hard failure just reflects that there are a lot simple combinations to try. I.e. we expect lots of zero progress, and then a fit.

Like finding the numbers to a combination lock.

For hard problems, if we don't make any progress it is a really bad sign. We should be learning something, even if it turns out to be irrelevant later.

Such as when we are trying to prove a tricky conjecture.