It was 11 p.m. and I had just picked up my 13-year old son and his best friend from a bar mitzvah party in the Emory area of Atlanta. They jumped in the car all hyped up on energy, and apparently, lots and lots of soda.

As I drove them home, they gave me the play by play of the night. The big happening was apparently two girls got into a “fist fight,” which sounded much more like a push fight when they described it. But the idea that there was a fist fight was more exciting, so I let it slide.

“The dancing was the best part!” my son said.

“Yeah, that was SO fun!” his friend said. And then he sang the words, “Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon…”

My son said, “Oh, you were saying ‘watermelon’? I was saying, ‘chicken nuggets’!”

They kept singing those words until I couldn’t take it anymore, finally breaking it up by saying, “what in the world are you two talking about?”

“When you don’t know the words to a song but you want people to think you do, you can just mouth the words ‘watermelon’ or ‘chicken nuggets’ and it looks like you know the song,” my son said.

Huh.

I tried it the other day (in the car, by myself) and sure enough, it works. Pretty much any song, if you silently sing ‘watermelon’ or ‘chicken nuggets’, it looks like you’re singing along.

Early on at my first company, Spunlogic, my partner and I (Raj Choudhury) were trying to figure out how to sell services to clients that we had never done before. We were 22-years old and were confounded by the dilemma. How would we grow if we could only sell what we’d done in the past (which was almost nothing)?

Then we watched a movie called, Pirates of Silicon Valley. We were in my parents’ basement — our ‘corporate headquarters’ as we liked to say — and we were amazed by what we were seeing. It was the story of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in the early years. Jobs was of course the more dynamic, more creative, more intoxicating of the two.

But it was Bill Gates that captured our attention. He essentially sold Microsoft’s operating system (MS-DOS) to IBM before they had even built it. Bill kind of lied, kind of didn’t. He said they had an operating system (at best they had a small semblance of one) and that they could deliver it on the agreed upon date. Of course, a lot would have to happen to pull that off, but he was confident that he would live up to his agreement.

He did, and it all worked out, and now (side note) Bill Gates is just about one of the best humans on the planet. I’ll probably write about that soon, but just Google some of the things he’s doing to make the world a better place. I put him up there with President Carter in terms of the impact he’s making globally.

When Bill sold MS-DOS to IBM, he was close to our age — he was 25, we were 22. If he could do that, why not us?

And thus, we had a new term. When we were going to sell something that we had not done before, but sell it with confidence and then, of course, make sure we delivered, we would call that: Gates-ing.

Gates-ing became a common phrase for us over the next few years. For example, when we won our first email assignment, we Gates-ed our way through it. We never lied, exactly, and we always made sure we delivered in the end. But that word gave us the confidence to go after our dreams.

Sometimes in life, you have to fake it until you make it. Sometimes you do that with tricks, like saying ‘watermelon’ or ‘chicken nuggets’ while dancing with your friends. But more often than not it has to start with the confidence that you can actually pull it off.

Confidence is a tricky thing to achieve. It usually comes from experience. Trying something new, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not, but getting back up and working at it until you achieve your goal. That builds confidence within you. Another way is to surround yourself with people that support you. People that build you up rather than tear you down. People that believe in you, no matter what.

And if you’re really lucky, people that will Gates their way through life with you.

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