The plant that thrives next door may need conditions your own yard cannot offer.

What flourishes somewhere else is answering that place: its light, its drainage, its shelter from the afternoon wind. Copying the plant without the conditions is copying the visible half of the arrangement. The same is true of routines, methods and lives that look enviably well from across a fence. You are usually seeing the result and not the soil.

Before you import something that is working for someone else, ask what it depends on. Then ask honestly which of those conditions you have. Where they differ, look for the thing that suits your ground rather than a better effort at theirs.