We explore how people “bootstrap”, or reuse chunked action sequences, to tackle complex problems, in a novel puzzle task. In this task, participants perform sequences of actions to recreate target shapes. In our experimental condition, participants are trained on problems whose best solutions share a distinct abstract action sequence, or schema. Meanwhile, a control group trained on tasks of commensurate difficulty whose solutions did not conform to this pattern. We find experimental-condition participants outperform controls in a set of more difficult test puzzles whose solutions are compositional generalizations of experimental group’s training tasks. Notably, the experimental group outperformed controls even in “far transfer” tasks that lacked surface similarity to training in both their target shape and solution sequence. Our results provide a compelling demonstration of the human ability to cache and reuse abstract patterns, offering new insights into how humans approach complex problems that, naively, seem to demand a prohibitive amounts of planning or trial and error.