One day a man saw a butterfly shuddering on the sidewalk, locked in a seemingly hopeless struggle to free itself from it's now useless cocoon.
Feeling pity, he took out his pocket knife, carefully cut away the cocoon and set the butterfly free. To his dismay, it lay on the sidewalk, convulsed weakly for awhile, then died.
A biologist later told the man "That was the worst thing you could have done! A butterfly needs that struggle to develop the muscles to fly. By robbing him of the struggle, you made him too weak to live."
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The takeaway lesson here is that we can only truly excel after we have struggled through a challenge on our own. This is what Nietzsche was talking about when he said "That which does not kill us makes us stronger."
This also means that allowing others to struggle (to some extent) is actually good for them. The irony is that if you solve all their problems they'll be weaker for it in the long run - you haven't helped them at all.
An interesting thing relating to this principle recently happened to me. My daughter had never been ice skating and we were passing by an ice rink on our way to a museum in DC. She wanted to try so Rae and I each took an arm and stood on each side of her. She did horribly - falling all over the place and legs flailing everywhere. Our astute observational skills (LOL) realized our assistance wasn't helping so we decided to let her skate on her own, with us just staying close by.
We were amazed, but she immediately did 1000x better. Turns out we were hurting her by helping too much! Of course this was probably due to us preventing her ability to use her arms for balance, but I thought it was a pretty cool example of how helping people too much is a negative thing.
It's hard as a parent sometimes to hold back and watch the little ones struggle and even fail on their own when you know you could jump right in and save them. The fact is though that they rarely need "saving" and they continue to amaze us with what they can do (and even master) on their own if we give them a little space.
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