Now this is what I call a competitive answer field. Hmm... I wonder if I can at least overtake Ashton Kutcher. Overtaking Naval Ravikant is probably out of the question.

I'll stick to things that are deterministically doable, and assume you are starting with no special advantages (if you are Steve Job's nephew, don't listen to me).

So I will avoid things like "hire people smarter than yourself" which are probabilistic (they may not want to work for you). I will also avoid constraints/principles at the individual project level, because most of the important constraints and principles have to be respected/practiced before you pick a project idea to work on.

So these are things (a nice round number, 10) you can do without any uncertainty, that will increase your chances and can be done by anyone based in the US, and should ideally be done before you pick a project, not during.

And like all good dogmas, each of these can be broken in the right situation. What rules you choose to break/bend will define your signature style that will stay with you across projects.

1. Physical Immersion: Move to the Bay Area or study there if you are pre-college (yup, repeated point, but a big point worth repeating)
2. Digital Immersion: Read Techcrunch, RWW, Paul Graham etc. regularly and religiously. But make up your own mind about the ideas/news.
3. Social Immersion: Make at least 8-12 good friends who you hang out with regularly, who are also doing tech entrepreneurship in one way or another. Help 'em out occasionally if they need help. Not merely to collect brownie points to cash in later (not a good basis for friendship), but to get into the "game mind" through osmosis and observation. Without this, you will lack calibration about too many important variables like what "rockstar talent" looks like, how much time/money it takes to do different things, what the baseline level of the game is, what the current insider lingo is, etc.
4. Market Immersion: Use as much of the technologies in the markets where you hope to make a contribution. Whether or not you have actual ideas/projects going on, constantly talk to people outside the entrepreneurial world. They are the market.
5. Financial Discipline: Save money like crazy, learn to live as ridiculously cheaply as possible in your personal life. "Lean" is a subconscious mindset, not an entrepreneurial model. It will unfortunately need to percolate through your whole life, including your relationships with significant others. The more money you have personally saved up by the time you make your move, the better. It is crucially important to not be totally dependent on the capital markets/VCs/Angels. There are plenty of business opportunities where you do not need them. That said, once you have enough to live on for at least 4-6 months out, you should be willing to make a move. If you feel like waiting for a bigger cushion, your risk-tolerance is likely not high enough for entrepreneurship.
6. Technical/Design Intuition: Learn programming. Any kind, and up to whatever level you can get to. Even if you want to be the non-tech person or do non-software technology. Learning some programming is the cheapest way to develop strong intuitions about all technology. Even things like mechanical or electrical engineering. I have found that non-techie types who don't have at least this level of competence tend to make bad mistakes.
7. Self-Promotion: either start a blog OR become a serious and sophisticated networker OR start doing outrageous things that get people talking. Whether you are a techie or non-techie, you need a way to promote yourself in the ecosystem, beyond individual projects. There are really only 3 ways: marketing, sales or PR. Or blogs, networking and outrageous acts. Yes, even if you are a techie. An example of an outrageous techie act might be to code a very complicated piece of software that does something hugely fun or buys you major geek street cred, but is otherwise of dubious commercial value (like a website that generates recognizable Simpsons' style caricatures out of photographs), or writing a free matrix manipulation library or a plugin that everyone needs, but is too hard to monetize).
8. Collect Strategic Assets: Important contacts, relationships with key companies/distributors etc long before you even have any idea if/how you might use them/be used by them. For this item, it is important to spend part of your time outside the Bay Area bubble/echo chamber. Take longer trips/short-term gigs to other parts of the country/economy. Your finance contact in New York or your logistics contact in Atlanta might be the key to your startup. If you are a foreigner in the US, your international connections might turn out to be key. Something is a strategic asset only if it is a unique and unfair advantage among a group of people with the same idea. A card others do not have. Also avoid strategic blunders (read: burning bridges, getting on bad terms with important people...)
9. Bargain Hunting: You should be constantly noticing, brainstorming and collecting business ideas in a little notebook or Evernote or something, along with notes on how you would execute them (zeroth-order business plan for the most obvious and logical way to do it). But (and this is key) you should not bet on any idea unless you find an opening that allows you to take one or more major shortcuts with respect to your initial brainstormed paper-napkin plan. The initial plan is almost certainly too expensive and requires too much brute force effort to pull off. In idea-selection, look for steals and bargains. Nobody who succeeds buys retail in idea markets.
10. Timing: Do NOT make your moves until you have developed sufficient situation awareness and a couple of strategic assets, and see an actual window of opportunity to place an unfair bet using a strategic asset and a window of opportunity that will likely close soon.