You Know Them, You Have The Picture To Prove It

America turned 250 this summer, and Monster Jam World Finals turned 25, so it was a big year for loud celebrations involving fireworks and horsepower.

We were in Salt Lake City for the World Finals, which for the fans is the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards rolled into one, a multi-day extravaganza where the best trucks and drivers in the sport throw everything they have at a title. I should be upfront that this is the family business, my family's company produces Monster Jam, I spent years of my career on the production side of shows like this one. I made the trip this year, and it thrills and inspires me every time.

I went for one night and a few hours of the pit party festivities, and I want to be honest that a few hours was enough to wipe me out, because temperatures pushed into the 90s and it stopped no one. The Pit Party is essentially a pop-up theme park, interactive activities, contests, exclusive merchandise, and hour after hour of photo and autograph opportunities with the actual trucks and the actual drivers. Even Blippi made it out. Families spent the entire day out there soaking it up, and the fans who did the full weekend in that sun have my ultimate respect and probably a sunburn.

The best comparison I can offer is a red carpet where all the biggest celebrities show up at once, except in this version you can walk right up to them. That access is the whole ballgame, and I mean the emotional ballgame, not the logistical one. Getting close to someone famous is one thing. Getting close and discovering they are exactly as generous and genuine as you hoped, that is the thing people carry home. Disappointment at close range is worse than distance, so proximity is a risk, and these drivers take it hundreds of times a day, in the heat, with a smile, for kids who will remember it forever.

Then, after each day of signing, posing, and shaking hands, those same athletes climb into the trucks and throw it all down on the track.

What happens in the stadium is the part no one can fake. The outcome is genuinely uncertain. The track design is unique to the event, the dirt and the obstacles evolve run by run, and sometimes the truck simply does not live up to its tune-up. Mechanical issues do not care that it is World Finals. The drivers sometimes blow the minds of the fans, and sometimes they surprise themselves, because a perfect run is never a given.

The cameras get close enough that you can watch all of it land in real time. The elation or the disappointment on a driver's face the second the run ends. The crew chiefs on the sidelines biting their nails, living and dying with every jump. The fans vote on freestyle, so the audience literally has a say in how the performance is judged, their feelings are part of the scoring.

Often there is an interview moments after a driver climbs out, still breathing hard, and everything is on display at once, the emotion, the exhaustion, the years of work, the character of the person under the helmet.

You leave feeling like you know them, and honestly, you kind of do. You have the picture to prove it.

How often can we say that about our favorite athletes or actors?

I think this is why a younger generation gravitates toward creators and personalities on platforms many of us have never opened. It is not the content, it is the feeling. Access, spontaneity, the sense of feeling what someone else is feeling while they are feeling it. Monster Jam has been delivering that in person for decades, no algorithm required, and watching it up close reminded me how rare and how powerful the real-life version is.

The meeting enhances the performance and the performance enhances the meeting. Once you have shaken someone's hand and watched them attempt something difficult in front of tens of thousands of people, you are invested. Their risk becomes your risk. When the run goes wrong, you feel it in your chest, and when it goes right, you are on your feet with strangers, screaming for a person you met a few hours earlier.

There is also an appreciation that sneaks up on you, for the long, hard days these athletes and crews put in to make the show possible. I was wiped out after a few hours of hot sun and heart-racing spectator excitement, so I can only imagine how flat-out the drivers and their crews were by Sunday night. Maybe they run on the same fuel as the trucks. I run on coffee, which is not the same.

Most of us are not driving Grave Digger for a living, and yet I kept thinking about the people I work with.

In my coaching work, I spend a lot of time with accomplished people on the way they introduce themselves, their small talk, the way they generally talk about who they are. The pattern is almost universal, the more successful someone is, the more their introduction sounds like a resume being read into a court record. And the transformation I get to watch, over and over, is what happens when they lead with their energy and their humanity instead. The room changes and people lean in. The credentials still exist, they just stop doing the talking.

The drivers in Salt Lake City have championships and title belts and decades of stats, and not one of them opened with any of it. They opened with a handshake and a Sharpie.

So a few things worth trying on, wherever you happen to perform.

Consider letting people watch you attempt something, not just announce that you finished it. The pitch you are nervous about, the new business model you have not perfected, the question you answer honestly in real time instead of in a prepared statement. Proximity to the attempt is what builds the investment.

Consider where your audience, your team, your customers, your kids, could be given an actual say, just like the way the Monster Jam fans vote on freestyle. A stake in the outcome converts spectators into participants, and participants come back.

Consider whether the people who admire your work or work within your organization can get anywhere near you, and what you lead with when they do. Accessibility is not a loss of status, at World Finals it was the status. The biggest names in the sport were the ones standing in the sun the longest.

The trucks were incredible, they always are. What filled the stadium was the feeling of being close to people trying something hard, in public, with no guarantee, and being welcomed right up to the edge of it, surrounded by thousands of others who share the same passion and devotion for these trucks, a fandom that matches the scale of the event, coming together as one big community under the same hot sun.

That part does not require a stadium.

From Your Biggest Champion,

Nicole