Some time ago I have a read a very famous book of Allen I. Holub "Enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot" (this book on openlibrary.org). I have read it in Russian and the book was titled with exact, i.e. word-by-word translation of the original English title. And, as you can imagine, it was totally nonsensical. Then I became interested in the meaning of the original title.
I found out that this is a nice play of two idioms:
give somebody enough rope (to hang themselves) meaning to allow someone to do what they want to, knowing that they will probably fail or get into trouble
to shoot yourself in the foot meaning you do something that damages your ambition, career, etc.
I started to think about better translation, but the question is: can you think of a short phrase in English without idioms to keep the same meaning? It would be also interesting if there are proverbs or set expressions with the same idea.