In my early 20s, I got really lucky.

After graduation from university, I went to live and work in China for a year. Shortly after I came back, I got a job where, right from the very first morning, I learned a ton of very useful stuff they never teach you in college.

And so, in the space of about three years I went from being someone who had almost never been abroad to being someone who had lived and worked in China, and from being someone who didn’t even know how to move a pallet 30 kilometers to being someone who knew how to source factories and run production lines on the other side of the globe. It was a mind-bending, life-defining streak of luck.

But then the company I worked for went bankrupt and laid off everyone, including me, in the space of one day. Black Friday, I still call it.

I went to live in rural Utah for the summer, exhausted and heartbroken. How on earth, I thought, could a summer in the middle of nowhere offer learning opportunities that could rival those?

And then luck showed up again, in a completely unexpected way.

You see, my job that summer was to stand outside a market and offer peach samples to tourists.

We had learned that having someone standing outside the store offering peach samples significantly raised the conversion rate and the average ticket price of the customers’ purchases inside the store. The interaction had to be outside the store, though, not inside. And it had to be a human interaction, it did absolutely no good to just set out a tray of samples for people to try. And there had to be a wooden barrel separating the person offering the samples from the customers. And the person handing out the samples couldn’t just be anyone. It had to be a smiley, friendly, chatty person (that’s where I came in).

It was a great summer. Hike in Zion National Park in the morning. Hand out peach samples during the day. Swim in the lake in the late afternoon. Eat great southwestern food for dinner. Go to bed early. Get up the next day and do it again.

I only did it for a short time. 4 months later, it was back to Seattle for me, where the tremendous streak of luck would continue in new and unexpected ways. But that peach job was one of my most favorite jobs ever, because it taught me some amazingly valuable skills, skills I would use for the rest of my life. I learned how to work a crowd. I learned how to make, and then break, and then make again, eye contact. I learned that sometimes the best way to pull someone in closer is to give them space (something I still struggle with, actually). I learned the power of human connection.

You might ask what this has to do with your presentations. And here it is: If all your audience wanted was data, they could get that in an email. No, the reason you are there is to put a human next to the data, because people need that. They need you to make some eye contact (but not too much, and not for too long, because that’s called staring and it’s kind of freaky). They need you to smile, because humans tend to do what they see other humans doing, and if you are smiling, chances are pretty good that they will smile too. Information goes down a lot better when you’re smiling.

And that’s why you practice a lot beforehand. When you walk up there to the front of the room, you want to know the presentation pretty much by heart, so your bandwidth is freed up for these human operations, because that’s what your audience came for.

Without you, it could have just been an email. You, a human, are there, and that’s what makes it special.

It’s just like if your audience members hadn’t run into the smiley kid handing out peaches, they would have handed over $5 at the cash register without emotion, but instead they are handing over $10 and walking away with a happy memory. The only thing that causes the different outcome is that a human was thrown into the mix.

Me floating in one of the pools on the property after a hard day of hiking and handing out peach samples.