RfA is performative. I've written my handful of easy-to-meet, specific criteria here because it hopefully reduces drama on the RfA page, itself. These are my own opinions and are listed in order of importance. Please note that I have read WP:AAAD and disagree with many points listed there. If you give people a reason to oppose you, they will. Despite what Jimbo says, adminship is a big deal. Ultimately the vote count at RfA doesn't matter because the bureaucrats decided that they get to make whatever call they want, which means that requesting adminship is very much a political act. Maybe if you follow my guidance, the 'crats will like you. Maybe if you fail to follow these, they won't.

1. Don't be a new editor. As WP:TOONEW describes, RfA is frequently a trap for clueless n00b editors who mean well but clearly don't know anything about Wikipedia. Sometimes the request itself is a misguided effort for self-aggrandizement.
2. Follow the instructions on WP:GRFA and WP:RFAADVICE. Those essays specify much of what you must perform. If you fail to do that, you're either clearly incompetent and competence is required or you have contempt for our community. Either fault tells me that you ought to be run off Wikipedia.
3. Know how to deal with questions. There are three boilerplate questions off the top. After that, you get however many other questions. If you don't know how to answer, don't. You earn more respect by answering questions with good, well-thought answers; the more questions answered, the better. However, if you botch your response you will get opposed. You might never recover from a mistake. Realize that some of the questions posed are either deliberate traps to derail you or are unfair questions by disgruntled editors, so answering these will always be a tricky proposition. Whoever is nominating you should have you prepped for likely questions.
4. Have a good nominator. Odds are the candidate is unknown to most of us so you should choose a nominator with a good reputation to at least get your foot in the door. That nominator is both an indicator of political buy-in and an independent voice that believes in your candidacy. If your nominator is known to be a soft-touch or a long-term curmudgeon, the distaste editors have for them will rub-off on you. If a good, well-known editor has faith in you then I'm a lot more willing to give you a chance. That nominator should then provide a compelling case for your adminship. A bland regurgitation of your edit history won't be as impressive as a well-thought case specifying where in Wikipedia you'd be contributing. Ideally, you have a specific backlog in mind where you've been clerking or actively editing and you need the tools to do more. If you're self-nominating you should reconsider.
5. Show me you've been around the block RfA is the pinnacle of a Wikipedia career, not the start. That means content creation, countervandalism, and WikiProject participation. You have to show you're one of us in order for us to allow you to then block our accounts and delete our content. If you've been gnoming away somewhere and don't write content then why should you be an admin over me? We each have our own method of contributing but policing those that write the encyclopedia reasonably assumes you understand the space.
6. Control your ego. I'm an opponent of hat collecting because it's an indicator that you have less than pure motives. It'll happen sometimes that a good editor will become an egomaniac once they get the mop; we can't always foresee that. If you're trying to become an admin, odds are it's for the wrong reasons. If anything, any RfA candidate should be reluctant and have a legion of Wikimedians pushing them to serve the community with mop and bucket. Again, you have to show me there's some political consensus pushing you to be an admin and you subsequently make all the right moves during your five minutes on-stage. If no one else wants you to be an admin and you can't even look the part, then why are you wasting my time?
7. Don't attempt to shout-down dissent Neither you nor your surrogates should be arguing with opposers. I think the aggregate can see the hypocrisy when meaningless support votes are allowed to just pile-on but every oppose vote is met with long diatribes accusing the opposers of malice. Yes, your supporters (and you better have several) should correct untrue accusations and protect your image but attacking those that disagree with you looks desperate and the community will want to oppose you even more. If we allow RfA to turn into a bitter fight we'll discourage the honest brokers while empowering the street hoodlums. Because RfA is so political, divisive candidates should just stay away.
8. Have a good AfD record Participating in AfD is perhaps one of the most important mesopedian things you can do on wiki and it's really the best metric. AfD is a behind-the-scenes area of Wikipedia that admins must understand as well as a backlog we always need admins to work (closing discussions and deleting where appropriate). We have so many poor-quality articles that many face deletion daily. Admins are essentially judges issuing a verdict after hearing the lawyers (the editors) make opposing cases (keep or delete). Lawyers make cases based on applying statutes (various policies, guidelines, and essays) and sadly, precedent (WP:OUTCOMES). A persuasive litigator can convince the aggregate. To be elected a judge you have to show us you're a good litigator. I like to see at least 30 !votes at AfD. If we assume the consensus on those AfD's was correct then you should be !voting with the consensus at least 70% of the time if not better. Every time you differ from the outcome (and I do plenty) do you know why? Can you argue why the consensus is wrong? Further, are you a deletionist or inclusionist? What does your record show? If you lean hard one way or the other expect to be opposed.

I know some will critique these criteria as standards creep but I'd point out that it's not 2005 anymore. As this project matures the admin corps has to mature with it. Adminship is a wide remit which can affect so many disparate communities of editors. Adminship became a big deal when ARBCOM and the admins working the drama boards repeatedly hesitated to punish their fellow admins for misbehavior, creating the "Super Mario" effect. Desysopping became a career-ending sentence and those of us non-admins understood we better stop bad candidates before they become too powerful to be accountable. BIGDEAL is reified every time a good admin hands in their tools at WP:BN as a gesture or a bad admin performs the once annual admin action to keep their tools as a status symbol. Many editors see adminship as a political building block towards ARBCOM, so RfA is the community's best chance to stop the megalomaniacs among us. I've also become concerned that some bureaucrats have odd interpretations of what criteria are reasonable. You cannot gauge what I'm looking for in an admin based on your own RfA perhaps many years ago. If you feel threatened by an increasing set of editor expectations then you can either up your game or thank your lucky stars we don't require regular no-confidence votes.

These are totally optional and beyond my criteria.

1. Don't ever express that you want to be an admin.
2. Earn permissions like reviewer and rollbacker and use them. Ask to have any permissions you don't use taken away from you.
3. Keep a clean block record.
4. Pitch in at WP:AFC, WP:GOCE, WP:NPP, and the like.
5. Graduate WP:CVUA and get a thousand countervandalism edits. Understand what tools like Twinkle and AWB can do.
6. Write at least one good article and get a hook through Did You Know.
7. Earn Veteran Editor III
8. Participate in our real-life events like Meetups, edit-a-thons, etc. Not only does it help to be a known quantity to fellow editors, your experience with potential editors on their first day editing can be illuminating. The IPs and new editors you deal with here are actual people in the real world and it might help if you meet them in person just once.
9. When you've done all the above use WP:ORCP. It's a good way to test the waters and perhaps find a nominator. You should be able to pass with 80% or better.