These are the only things you need to do to be successful*. You can get away with just doing one of the two, but that's rare, and usually someone else is doing the other part for you.
If you you don't have any marketable skills, learn some. It's the future. We have Khan Academy and Wikipedia and Codecademy and almost the entire world's collective knowledge at your fingertips. Use it.
Then make something that you can talk about. Make something cool. Something interesting. Spend time on it. Go crazy. Even if it's the least useful thing you've ever made, if you can talk about it, make it. This part is easy, because you're doing something you think is cool, and interesting, and if it's useless, great, because you won't need to support it much either!
Next, find events where the people you want to work with are. Then get a drink into you (or don't) and talk to them about it. Relax. It's probably interesting to them too. Even if it's not, because you've made it, you sound like you know what the hell you're talking about. That's the important part. This is easy, too, because you're talking about something you've made that you think is cool and interesting. As an added bonus, many people go to these events just to talk about cool and interesting things, so you'll fit right in.
You would not believe how much opportunity is out there for those who do things and tell people. It's how you travel the entreprenurial landscape. You do something interesting and you tell everyone about it. Then you get contacts, business cards, email addresses. Then you get contracts, job offers, investors, whatever. You make friends who think what you do is cool. You make a name for yourself as "the person who did that cool thing." Then, the next time someone wants to do something in any way related to that cool thing, they come to you first.
Ciarán McCann and I (mostly him) started working on a HTML5 game engine and blog when we were in first year of college. We never even finished it, but because of Flax, we landed internships at Ericsson in the summer of our second year. Now I'm on my way to Game Closure, and Ciarán is going to Demonware. We just did things and told people.
