The other day I was talking to a friend of mine. He had been enduring an extended period of deep pain, and it just kept coming in waves, worse and worse and worse. It was “Job-like,” he said.

(Job, or “Eyüp” for our Turkish speakers here, is of course the guy God subjected to immense amounts of pain for years, as a test of Job’s faith.)

I know that when someone invokes the Job metaphor, the pain is pretty severe and I need to listen up carefully. I first heard someone invoke that metaphor decades ago, when a girlfriend, in describing her life, said it had been Job-like. Me being a person of, shall we say, not particularly deep religious background, I initially wasn’t sure what she meant by the metaphor, so I had to google Job afterwards and read up a bit on him.

Anyway, my friend asked me why I thought this happened to people. I said my answer has two parts, and the first part is “I don’t know.” Religions have been trying to answer this one for thousands of years, and for me to think I have anything to add to the conversation is, well, a bit unrealistic. But, I told him, when I hear something is “unrealistic,” I tend to think in terms of “challenge,” not “limit,” so I’m going to try anyway. And this is what I said:

Populations expand to the limits Nature puts on them. That means that every single organism feels like it’s about to break, all the time. Every single one. If there’s an organism that’s not feeling that pain, Nature will allow the population to expand. For example, if there are 100 organisms in the system, and one of them is not feeling this pain, Nature will say there’s slack in the system, and it will allow the population to expand to 101.

What this means is that every single organism in a population feels like it’s about to break, all the time.

You might ask what this has to do with presentations. Here it is:

Every single member of your audience is feeling pain. You might not see it, but it’s there. The job of your presentation is to relieve that pain.

When you are preparing your presentation, one of the first questions you should ask yourself, long before you even open PowerPoint and start moving text boxes around, is “What pain is my audience feeling?”

Your answer doesn’t need to be profound, so don’t feel that pressure. If you are delivering a quarterly sales report, maybe your answer is just “My audience is feeling the pain of not knowing how sales were last quarter.”

That’s fine. Like I said, you don’t have to connect spiritually to some deep truth. After all, it’s just a presentation for work. But you do need to know what pain those people are feeling, and your presentation needs to make it go away. Nature will replace that pain with something else moments later, no matter what you do, but your presentation’s job is to relieve your audience’s pain, if only for a few moments.