Why 99% of People Never Succeed

Success isn’t what most people think it is. It’s not intelligence, education, wealth, dedication, or natural talent. Former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante spent years traveling the world, meeting people from every conceivable background—from impoverished communities to elite circles, from allies to adversaries—and discovered something that contradicts nearly every success story you’ve been told.

The dividing line between those who succeed and those who don’t isn’t resources, advantages, or even ambition. It’s simpler and more unforgiving than that: some people are always trying to build something, and some people are just trying to survive.

That’s it. That’s the pattern. And once Bustamante recognized it during his CIA career, he saw it everywhere—across cultures, economic circumstances, and professions. The successful weren’t the smartest or most privileged. They were the builders. The unsuccessful weren’t lazy or incapable. They were survivors, focused on getting through another day without making waves.

In his conversation on Everyday Spy, Bustamante doesn’t sugarcoat this reality. If you’re not building something, you’re not going anywhere. Period.

Watch Andrew Bustamante explain the builder mindset on Everyday Spy

The Builder Mindset

The type of person who succeeds is not smart, handsome, dedicated, blessed, or from money. That’s not the stereotype. The stereotype is that the hyper successful person is always trying to build something they care about.

It doesn’t matter if building that thing takes ten years or ten weeks. What matters is they’re always building. They’re focused on construction, not mere existence. They’re directing energy toward creating something that didn’t exist before—a business, a skill set, a body of knowledge, a relationship, a career, a piece of art.

Builders aren’t necessarily passionate about what they’re building at every moment. They’re not always inspired or motivated. But they maintain directional momentum. They’re moving toward something they’ve decided matters, and they keep moving even when progress is slow, frustrating, or invisible to others.

This isn’t about having a grand vision or revolutionary ideas. It’s about the daily orientation of your energy. Are you trying to construct something, or are you just trying to make it through the day?

The Survivor Mindset

The person who’s never trying to build anything is destined to fail and be a repetitive failure forever, and they don’t even realize they’re the cause of their own turmoil.

Bustamante observed this pattern consistently, regardless of circumstances. Whether talking about an impoverished person in India, someone from the wrong family in Brazil, or a middle-aged American, when they’re focused on the wrong thing, they remain stuck.

Survivors aren’t focused on building. They’re focused on surviving. Getting through the week. Skating by without causing problems. Avoiding discomfort. Minimizing risk. Not making waves. Hoping things somehow improve without having to change anything fundamental.

This mindset feels rational when you’re in it. You have bills to pay, responsibilities to meet, limited time and energy. Building something sounds nice, but survival is immediate and pressing. So you optimize for getting through each day with minimum friction.

The trap is that survival mode never leads anywhere. It’s a lateral move repeated indefinitely. You survive this week, then next week, then next month, then next year. Time passes. Nothing compounds. You remain in approximately the same position, wondering why life hasn’t improved despite your effort to manage everything.

The survivor believes they’re being responsible, practical, and realistic. They’re actually choosing stagnation while calling it stability.

Why the Distinction Matters More Than Circumstances

This is the insight that contradicts most success narratives. Bustamante saw successful builders in circumstances that would crush most people. He saw privileged survivors wasting every advantage. Circumstances matter less than orientation.

Whether you’re talking about an impoverished Indian, someone from the wrong family name in Brazil, or typical middle America, in all cases, they’re focused on the wrong thing. They’re not focused on trying to build. They’re focused on trying to survive, skate by, go without causing any waves.

The person in difficult circumstances who’s trying to build something—anything—has a future. The person in comfortable circumstances who’s just surviving has already plateaued. They just don’t know it yet because the plateau feels safe.

Resources help. Advantages help. Education, connections, and capital all help. But they help builders. They do almost nothing for survivors because survivors use every resource to maintain their current position rather than construct something new.

Give a survivor more money and they’ll use it to survive more comfortably. Give a builder more money and they’ll use it to build faster. The orientation predicts the outcome more reliably than the inputs.

The Energy Allocation Problem

Here’s where this connects to everything else Bustamante teaches. Your energy is finite. You can direct it toward building or surviving, but you can’t do both simultaneously with full commitment.

Surviving takes energy—sometimes enormous amounts of it. Jobs you tolerate. Relationships you maintain out of obligation. Situations you endure because change seems too difficult. All of this requires energy, and it’s energy spent on maintenance, not construction.

Builders allocate energy differently. They spend energy on hyperawareness activities that drain them because those activities are constructing something. They go to the gym even though it’s hard because they’re building physical capacity. They start businesses even though it’s uncertain because they’re building an asset. They have difficult conversations even though it’s uncomfortable because they’re building authentic relationships.

Then they refuel through hyperfocus and repeat the cycle. Energy out toward construction, energy in through restoration, energy out again toward construction.

Survivors spend energy on hyperawareness too—being self-conscious at work, worrying about perception, managing anxiety about circumstances they won’t change. But it’s energy spent maintaining a position they don’t want to be in. Then they refuel through hyperfocus and use that refueled energy to survive another week in the same position.

Same energy management mechanism. Completely different trajectory.

The Disguised Survivor

Many people believe they’re building when they’re actually surviving. They have career ambitions and goals. They talk about what they want to accomplish. They may even work hard. But their energy is directed toward surviving in their current structure rather than building something new.

You can work sixty hours a week and still be a survivor if those sixty hours are spent maintaining your position, proving your value, managing relationships so you don’t get fired. That’s high-effort survival, not building.

Building means your energy is creating new capacity, new assets, new capabilities. You’re not just maintaining—you’re constructing. The thing you’re building might take years to complete, but it’s growing. If it’s not growing, you’re not building. You’re working, maybe working hard, but you’re not constructing anything that compounds.

This distinction is uncomfortable because it reveals that effort alone doesn’t guarantee progress. You can spend decades being productive, responsible, and hardworking while building nothing that changes your trajectory.

What Builders Actually Build

Builders build different things based on their interests and circumstances, but certain patterns emerge. They build skills that compound. They build relationships based on authentic connection rather than transaction. They build businesses or careers that create increasing value over time. They build bodies that function better than they did before. They build knowledge bases that expand their capacity.

What they’re building isn’t always obvious or impressive to outside observers. It might be technical expertise in a narrow domain. It might be fluency in a language. It might be a body of written work. It might be a network of relationships in a specific community.

What matters is that the thing grows. It gets more valuable, more capable, more developed over time. If you looked at it five years ago and look at it now, there’s been clear construction. If you look at it five years from now, it will be more developed still.

That’s building. The rest is just activity.

The Survival Trap

Bustamante is direct about this because the consequences are severe. There’s no future for the person who uses the energy they save to just make it through a miserable day.

The survival trap works like this: your circumstances are difficult or uncomfortable, so you focus on surviving them. Surviving takes all your energy. Since all your energy goes to surviving, you have none left for building. Since you’re not building, your circumstances don’t improve. Since your circumstances don’t improve, surviving continues to take all your energy.

The trap isn’t that circumstances are difficult. The trap is that you’re allocating energy to survive them rather than build your way out of them. And surviving never leads out. It just extends the same situation indefinitely.

Breaking this trap requires a hard choice: stop optimizing for survival and start building something even though your circumstances haven’t improved yet. Use energy to construct something new while still dealing with the difficulty of your current situation. This feels impossible, which is why most people never do it.

But it’s the only path that actually leads somewhere different. You don’t build after your circumstances improve. You build until your circumstances improve. The building is what changes circumstances, not the other way around.

The Geographic Irrelevance of Builder vs. Survivor Mindset

Bustamante has made his own unconventional choice based on these principles. He’s planning to leave the United States with his family, but not because he thinks America is failing. He thinks America is entering a difficult decade where opportunity will be constrained, where growth will be harder, where the environment will be more challenging.

His response isn’t to survive those challenges. His response is to build in a different environment where his children will have more opportunity to build their own futures. That’s a builder’s response—change the conditions to optimize for construction rather than accept conditions that require survival.

But the geographic location isn’t the point. Bustamante could stay in America and continue building. He could move to a worse situation and still build. The location matters to him for his specific priorities, but it doesn’t determine whether he’s building or surviving. That determination is internal.

You can be a survivor in the most opportunity-rich environment. You can be a builder in constrained circumstances. The environment affects difficulty and timeline, but it doesn’t control orientation.

What Building Requires

Building requires three things that survivors avoid: tolerating discomfort, accepting uncertainty, and spending energy on things that might not work.

Discomfort is mandatory because building means doing things you haven’t done before. If it were comfortable, you’d already be there. Construction happens at the edge of your current capacity, which is definitionally uncomfortable.

Uncertainty is mandatory because you’re creating something that doesn’t exist yet. You don’t know exactly how it will turn out. You can’t guarantee success. This uncertainty feels risky, which makes surviving feel safer. But that safety is an illusion—staying where you are also has risk, it’s just familiar risk that doesn’t feel as threatening.

Spending energy without guaranteed returns is mandatory because building means taking chances. Not every project works. Not every business succeeds. Not every relationship develops how you hope. Builders spend energy on attempts that might fail, then try again. Survivors avoid attempts entirely to prevent failure, which guarantees they build nothing.

These requirements explain why building is rare. Most people prefer the known difficulty of surviving to the unknown difficulty of building. The irony is that surviving never gets easier—it just becomes familiar—while building creates compounding returns that eventually make everything easier.

The Decision

Bustamante isn’t telling you what to build. He’s telling you that if you’re not building something, your trajectory is already determined. You’ll be wherever you are now, with minor variations, indefinitely. That’s not pessimism. That’s mechanics.

Surviving doesn’t lead to eventual success through accumulated effort. It leads to prolonged survival until circumstances force change you didn’t choose. Building—even slow, inconsistent, imperfect building—creates trajectory. It produces results that compound. It generates options you wouldn’t otherwise have.

The question isn’t whether you have the intelligence, resources, advantages, or perfect plan. The question is: are you building something or just surviving? If you’re not building, start. It doesn’t matter what. Pick something that matters enough that you’ll keep working on it when it’s difficult, boring, or seemingly pointless. Then build it. Direct energy toward its construction. Make it bigger, better, or more developed than it was last month.

Do that regardless of your circumstances, your advantages, or your natural abilities. The builders succeed. The survivors don’t. This pattern holds across every culture, economic system, and profession Bustamante encountered throughout his intelligence career.

You already know which category you’re in. The only question is whether you’re willing to change categories if you’re not where you want to be.