This idiom comes from an old Chinese story:
A farmer was worried that the rice seedlings in his field were growing too slowly.
One day, he had an idea: “Why not pull them up a little bit?”
So he went into the field and pulled each seedling a little higher.
At the end of the day, he was very tired but proud of himself.
He told his son: “Today I helped all the seedlings grow!”
But the next morning… all the seedlings were dead. 😢