I Thought Helping People Was Always the Right Thing to Do

It was shame.

I felt uneasy having money that many of my friends and people close to me didn’t have. And almost automatically, a rule appeared in my head:

if I had made it, then I should help everyone else make it too.

At the time, that felt right.

Today, I realize that this was where I started confusing two very different things:

helping someone and taking responsibility for their life.

I started my first business in early 2008.

The first few months were hard. We had a mortgage, other loans, a young child, and the new business was barely generating any income. At one point, there was a real risk that we could lose our property.

A few months later, the business started growing.

So did the responsibility.

My decisions were no longer just about my own money. There was my family, my partner, employees, and the company.

I worked a lot, slept very little, and was constantly flying between Israel and Cyprus.

I quickly got used to a simple rule:

if something is my responsibility, I have to deal with it.

What I didn’t understand yet was that one of my strengths would later become one of my problems.

I found it very easy to take responsibility.

As my income grew, it wasn’t only our lifestyle that changed.

I started feeling different around old friends.

Not long before, we had been talking about the same things: work, mortgages, bills, everyday problems.

Now my financial reality was different.

I didn’t feel better than anyone else.

For some reason, I felt I had to compensate for the difference.

If I had more opportunities, I should share them.

So I started helping.

I came up with business ideas for friends. Brought people into my companies. Invested money. Made introductions. Paid for trips and upgrades. Gave second chances.

And I genuinely enjoyed it.

But there was something I wasn’t seeing.

Too often, I saw people not as they were, but as who they could become.

I would think: maybe nobody ever gave him a real chance. Maybe he just needs some support. Some money. The right introduction. Someone to explain how it works.

And then he’ll grow into it.

More than once, I started businesses with friends and people I knew based on that belief.

Today, I can describe it more harshly:

sometimes I wasn’t investing in the person in front of me. I was investing in my own idea of who that person should become.

Potential and actual behavior are not the same thing.

For a long time, I treated them as if they were.

When someone failed, I genuinely couldn’t understand it.

I gave you money. I gave you an opportunity. I gave you contacts. I shared what I knew.

Why aren’t you doing what I would do?

And if the business failed, the money disappeared, and that same person ended up angry with me, my reaction was:

What the hell?

I was trying to help you. How did I become the bad guy?

It hurt.

people are ungrateful.

Sometimes, maybe they were.

But today that answer feels far too easy.

Because the more uncomfortable question is this:

why did I assume that another person should use an opportunity the same way I would?

That was my mistake.

Not that other people were different from me.

The mistake was believing that my own standard of responsibility was universal.

I thought that if someone truly wanted an outcome, they would do roughly what I would do to get it.

But my standard was mine.

I had no right to automatically make it someone else’s.

There was another contradiction.

I have always believed that personal responsibility is one of the most important human values.

But sometimes, by helping people, I was actually preventing them from fully experiencing it.

Someone made a mistake, I fixed it.

Something didn’t work, I gave another chance.

They ran out of money, I helped.

They fell, I caught them.

I thought I was taking on more responsibility.

Sometimes I was doing the opposite:

I was taking someone else’s responsibility and making it mine.

And that isn’t always help.

Sometimes it’s rescuing.

If you keep showing people that they can bring their problems to you, eventually some of them start seeing that as normal.

A gift becomes familiar.

Familiar becomes expected.

And then one day you say no, and the other person genuinely feels that something has been taken away from them.

By 2011–2012, I was running into this more and more.

Sometimes, after a few drinks, old friends would say things they usually wouldn’t say sober:

“Max, you make so much money now.”

“We’re friends.”

“Why aren’t you helping us?”

Or:

“Not everyone can be a businessman like you.”

It made me angry.

It felt incredibly unfair. I had wanted to do something good for people, and somehow my help had turned into an obligation.

But part of that system was created by me.

I had taught people to expect my help without ever setting a clear boundary.

Then I was surprised when they couldn’t see one.

That is a very effective way to destroy a relationship.

One person thinks:

“After everything I’ve done for you…”

The other thinks:

“You always helped me. Why did you stop?”

And both can genuinely feel betrayed.

That may have been the first time I understood that money changes much more than your standard of living.

It changes relationships, roles, expectations, and boundaries.

Sometimes even your ability to simply say no.

I thought having more money would give me more freedom.

I wasn’t prepared for the fact that it would also make some of my closest relationships much more complicated.

By 2013, I increasingly felt that I needed to change my environment.

Then we moved to Miami.

At the time, I thought some of the old problems would stay behind with the old place.

Life later taught me something pretty clearly:

if the problem is inside you, it travels very well internationally.

I kept seeing potential in people.

I kept giving chances.

I kept believing that if I helped a little more, supported a little longer, explained one more time, or caught someone before they fell, they might finally become the person I could see in them.

And I paid for that more than once.

Eventually, I realized that my problem wasn’t only that I had trouble saying no.

It went deeper.

I found it very hard to watch someone I could help make mistakes, fall, or make a mess of something in their own life, and do nothing.

If I saw a solution, I wanted to offer it.

If I saw a way out, I wanted to show it.

If I had resources, I wanted to give them.

If someone had already messed things up once, I wanted to give them another chance.

Walking away when I knew I could change something felt cruel.

But there is a big difference between abandoning someone and allowing them to live their own life.

It took me a long time to understand that.

Giving someone an opportunity does not mean guaranteeing their result.

You can believe in someone’s potential.

But decisions still have to be based on what they actually do.

Supporting someone does not mean carrying them.

And loving someone does not mean endlessly protecting them from the consequences of their own decisions.

One of the hardest things for me to accept was this:

not all help actually helps.

Sometimes a person really does need a chance.

Sometimes a second one.

But if you are always there at the exact moment when they are about to face the consequences of their own choices, maybe you are no longer helping.

Maybe you are simply preventing those consequences from happening.

And that leads to a question I used to find very difficult to ask myself:

who actually needs this help, them or me?

Do they truly need me because they cannot handle it without me?

Or do I need to help because I cannot tolerate watching someone I care about make a decision I believe is wrong?

I used to think strength meant being able to take on as much responsibility as possible.

I see it differently now.

Strength also means knowing which responsibility is actually yours.

Helping when help is truly needed.

Staying close when someone is struggling.

But not living their life for them.

And sometimes doing the thing that is much harder for someone who is used to rescuing:

not stealing from another person the responsibility that is theirs to carry.