When I was 28, the company I worked for bought a pepper grinder company. We would buy the raw peppercorns from India and have them shipped to the grinder companies in Thailand and China, where the grinders were made and then filled with the peppercorns.

It was the first time that I was responsible for making anything food-related. In the past, I had always been responsible for non-food items like stainless steel mixing bowls and plastic storage containers.

I was amazed to find out how little regulation there was for stuff that would end up coursing through the bloodstreams of other humans.

It’s like that all over the world. When we go to the grocery store to buy oranges, or eggs, or a loaf of bread, we are buying something that we are going to take into our bodies. We are walking out of that store carrying something that will get digested, enter our bloodstream, and become part of the tissue that makes up our brains, lungs, and hearts.

Those groceries will become part of us, and yet we trust that they are not laced with cyanide or something like that. Sure, in every country the government has a food inspection department, but at best those departments can only inspect a very small portion of the things we take into our bodies.

What does this have to do with your presentations? Your audience members don’t want you to tell them how the sausage gets made, they just want to eat the sausage.

You put your life’s work, your blood, sweat, and tears, probably some long nights and plenty of stress and worry, into the work that resulted in the presentation you are about to give.

But your audience isn’t there to hear about how hard you worked. Your audience is there to find out the results.

So like I’ve said before, kill your darlings, and remember that the things that are near and dear to you, your audience probably doesn’t care one whit about.

Or, in peppercorn-related parlance: No one ever cared about all the massive holes in the food supply chain, they just wanted pepper at dinner.

(yes, I see the irony of me talking about the horrors of learning how the sausage gets made, and then turning around and telling you not to do the same)