There is an old Shona saying, chisi hachieri musi wacharimwa, some things do not bear fruit the same day they are planted. It is a lesson I have learnt in many ways throughout my life. We live in a time when skill and mastery are so finely honed that they create an illusion: that greatness is effortless, that success is merely a matter of showing up at the right moment. I learnt this not in a lecture hall or a library, but in the fields of rural Zimbabwe, where the soil taught me a truth the world often forgets, mastery is not what you see.

I have always been fascinated by excellence, the kind that leaves an audience in awe. Watching Lionel Messi glide past defenders, leaving them tangled in his wake, it is easy to believe that football is simple. The ball sticks to his feet as though bound by some unseen force, and the goal, when it comes, feels inevitable. But you don’t see the childhood mornings in Rosario, Argentina, where Messi kicked a ball against a wall until his toes bled. You don’t see the injections, the rejections, the hours sculpting instinct into muscle memory. For every minute of magic on the field, there were hundreds of hours of unseen work. We’re sold the highlight reel, never the raw footage.

Farming, I learnt, is no different. I own a piece of land. It is nothing grand, just a small farm where I plant potatoes, pineapples, macadamia and sometimes try my hand at new crops for variety. When I started, I had the same naivety that many beginners do, I thought farming was easy. I had spent years watching seasoned farmers at work. The old muzvina purazi (farm owner) would show up at the field at 11 a.m., take a few rounds inspecting the crops, bark a few instructions, and leave. It seemed effortless, almost leisurely. I was convinced that I could do the same. If the pros made it look this simple, how hard could it be?

So, I started.

That first season was a disaster.

I planted late, thinking a week or two wouldn’t make much of a difference. I paid little attention to soil preparation, assuming the land was fertile enough. I neglected to water at the right times, and weeds ran riot because I figured, ah, ndicha sakura mangwana (I will weed tomorrow). By the time harvest season arrived, my yields were a fraction of what I had anticipated. I watched in dismay as my neighbours, the same ones I had assumed were merely strolling through their farms, harvested bags upon bags of potatoes while I barely filled a truckbed.

The greatest deception of expertise is its appearance of simplicity. We see the polished performance but miss the years of failure, learning, and relentless refinement that made it possible. We see the farmer in his truck at 11 AM but miss the crucial dawn hours that make those casual rounds effective.

I had been fooled by my own assumptions. The muzvina purazi I had observed was never idle, he was simply operating at a level I did not understand. He had been up since 4 a.m., planning, making phone calls to suppliers, monitoring weather reports, and adjusting strategies based on years of experience. The effortless appearance was not a lack of effort but the result of years of refining a system. I had mistaken the visible for the whole truth.

Yet we live in a world that glorifies the highlight reel. Social media, self-help gurus, and viral success stories sell us the lie that greatness is a product of talent, timing, or luck. We see the chef’s flawless dish, not the burnt meals that filled their trash can. TED Talks reduce lifelong disciplines to 18-minute pep talks, and AI tools promise to “democratise” skills by automating them. We applaud the entrepreneur’s “overnight” success, ignoring the bankruptcies they buried along the way. Expertise, stripped of its sweat and scars, becomes a parlour trick. And when we fail to replicate it, we blame ourselves. But true expertise resists shortcuts. It’s fractal the closer you look, the more layers you find. A farmer’s bountiful harvest isn’t luck, it’s planning, it’s ecology, it’s economics and ancestral wisdom.

This disconnect plagues our era. We mistake visibility for viability. A farmer’s yield is celebrated; the years of failed crops that taught them resilience are forgotten. A musician’s hit song goes viral; the decade of empty gigs and rejected demos stays hidden. We’ve created a culture that venerates outcomes but dismisses the process, leaving us impatient, frustrated, and quick to abandon our own journeys.

I see it in the way people approach IT today. A colleague once decided to “get into tech,” inspired by sleek office setups and the promise of remote work. He set up a laptop, dabbled with some tutorials, and called himself a tech professional. He didn’t see the late-night troubleshooting, the pressure of securing systems against evolving threats, or how a single misconfiguration could bring down an entire network. Like me years ago, he saw only the glamour, not the grind.

The danger of this illusion is twofold. First, it erodes respect for true expertise. When we assume technical proficiency is innate or effortless, we overlook the countless hours of debugging, learning, and adapting that build real skill. Second, it breeds disillusionment. Why persist in IT when success seems reserved for the so-called “naturals” who appear to grasp everything instantly? It’s the same issue I have with the plague of Mbinga culture – the obsession with overnight success. I’ve seen talented individuals abandon programming, cybersecurity, and data science because their early projects didn’t resemble the polished systems they admired online. They never learned that mastery is a slow ache, a lifetime of showing up even when no one claps.

Yet there’s a deeper tragedy here. When we trivialise expertise, we don’t just fail—we erode respect for the quiet, sustained labour that builds civilisations. It’s like a father who tells his children that anyone who has made money either stole it or is a ritualist. The unstated premise of that statement is that you can never be rewarded for effort. This is not to say there are no people who got there by harmful means, but when we make such broad dismissals, we destroy the belief in hard work and discipline as viable paths to success. Anyway, I digress.

As I gained more experience in farming, I began to see the same pattern everywhere. In every industry, in every profession, in every art form, true expertise is invisible to the untrained eye. We admire musicians who make melodies flow effortlessly but forget the years spent practising scales. We envy entrepreneurs who seem to turn ideas into fortunes overnight, not realising how many failed attempts paved the way for that one success. We marvel at writers who weave words beautifully, forgetting that behind every polished sentence is a pile of discarded drafts.

Looking back, I am grateful for the failure of my first harvest. It was a hard lesson, but a necessary one. And most importantly, I learnt patience.

Farming teaches you that there are no shortcuts. You can’t force a seed to germinate overnight. You can’t rush the rain. You can’t ignore the weeds and hope they won’t affect your crop. Everything has a process, and the best farmers the ones who make it look easy have simply learned to trust and master that process. But today, we’re all extractors, demanding abundance without tending the roots.

The remedy, I think, lies in redefining what we value. Not just the trophy or the yield, but the predawn hours, the callouses, the failures folded into wisdom. Mastery, like anything worth having, is a conversation with time.

This is the paradox of expertise: the better someone becomes at their craft, the easier they make it look, and the more they risk misleading others about what it truly takes to master something. As I write this, it’s almost 01:45. The greatest problem of our time isn’t just the prevalence of expertise – it’s our failure to see and appreciate the hidden hours that make that expertise possible.

Years from now, when my hands forget the weight of a hoe or the tic-tac of a computer keyboard, I will sit at the edge of my field and watch the light shift. Perhaps a young farmer will pass by, shoulders slumped under the weight of a failed season. I will say nothing. I’ll let the land speak to them as it spoke to me, in the language of patience, in the quiet arithmetic of dawns endured and storms weathered. 

The same soil that humbled me now breathes with the residue of every hand that tended it. It does not promise success, only continuity. A chance to add your layer to the story. 

When I am gone, my notebooks will gather dust. The trees will grow tall, then fall, then rise again. And somewhere, a child will kick a ball against a wall, over and over, chasing a flicker of magic they cannot yet name. 

The world will call it talent when they score their first goal. But you and I will know better…