The person I copied and the thing I got wrong

I copied something last month. Not literally, but I took a way of working I admired from someone else and tried it in my own project.

It did not work. Not because the idea was bad, but because it was built on assumptions that were true for them and not for me. Their context was different in ways that took me three weeks to notice.

I have learned more from copying badly than I have from copying well. Copying well hides the assumptions. Copying badly makes them visible, because they fail in your hands.

Now I try to understand why something works before I borrow it. What has to be true for this to help. What problem was it solving when the person who invented it was stuck. And I have found that the answer is usually more interesting than the thing itself.

Have you ever borrowed a way of working and found it did not fit? And did you learn more from the fit or the failure?