Helping Seedlings Grow by Pulling Them Upwards

"Helping seedlings grow by pulling them upwards” is an English Translation of a Chinese idiom “Ba Miao Zhu Zhang”. The idiom originated from a story and the story goes like this:

In ancient China, there was a farmer who grew rice. He hoped the rice seedlings would grow fast and was expecting a good harvest. So he went to the field to watch the rice seedlings every day. It seemed to him the seedlings were growing very slowly. He became anxious about the seedlings and said to himself: “I should do something to help the seedlings grow faster.”

He thought and thought and then had a great idea. "Why don’t I pull the seedlings upwards a little bit and that would help them grow faster.” After thinking of this, he went down to the field and pulled every seedling upward a little bit. After doing that, the seedlings did look taller.

Looking at the taller seedlings, he was happy though exhausted from the hard work. On his way back home, he couldn’t help thinking how smart and hardworking he was. He even couldn’t understand why people hadn’t discovered this method before.

However, several days later when he went back to field, he found all the seedlings had dried up and died.

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The basic meaning of “Helping seedlings grow by pulling them upwards” is spoiling things by excessive enthusiasm. It describes behaviors of people who are too eager to get things done only to make the things worse. I know I made such mistakes. Can you find examples of “Helping seedlings grow by pulling them upwards" in history and real life, for example, in some parents who want to help their children, in some religious groups that want to influence their followers, or in some governments that want to control their people?

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The above is a 4-6 minute speech I delivered in my Toastmasters club. The speech is based on a project titled "The Moral of a Story".