Learn how to manage bets. Some people have the resources to fail many times and keep going. Others do not. Knowing that a huge portion of starting a business is luck, you can better weigh your options and hopefully select different opportunities depending on your situation.

And, in the unfortunately common case, recognize when you cannot take any bets and instead focus on getting yourself to a place where you can, rather than betting everything and losing everything.

You can decide not to do it in the first place.

A 15-year-old hearing this talk from Graham as-is might take from it, "wow, if I learn programming, work on things that interest me, do well in school, and go to a good university, I'm guaranteed to build a Google-scale successful startup!"

Telling that kid that there's also a component of luck involved, and that the vast majority of startups fail, would temper that enthusiasm in a much more honest way. If that means fewer kids decide to start companies, that's obviously a negative in Graham's book, but may not be a negative for those kids themselves.

Not over leverage yourself such that if you fail you would be unable to recover.

use the knowledge that your plans may not succeed despite your best efforts to set expectations so that you are not emotionally devastated if this happens, and so that you are prepared in other ways as well.

take the shot, but have a back-up plan, basically.

Just to follow up, we’re discussing advice to young teenagers here.

I think it’s reasonable to inspire more than hedge. They’ll presumably already hear lots about what the least risky things to do are from many, many sources — that’s the default.

you can do a lot!

- discount the useless advice you get from people who got lucky and are unaware of this fact

- target trying to be in the right place at the right time and have a plan B if you don't get lucky, rather than waking up at 0400 every day to eat raw eggs or whatever

- respect yourself and your employees more

- be more generous with what luck brings you

etc etc etc

a much better question is why do YC and co not talk about luck and connections more? why do they pretend it's all some imaginary meritocracy rather than hugely dependent on going to the right school / being born into the right social class, and then hugely advantaged by having YC's name recognition and tame lendors attached?