My village is predominantly a farming community. Every household owns a plantation of one cash crop or the other and almost every adult has a food crops farm. In Kwamoano, farming is a way of life and it’s the main source of livelihood for the village folks.

Land clearing usually begins as early as January for green field lands and by March/April, sowing of seeds had already taken place, then harvesting begins in July/August.

The period between sowing and harvesting is the most difficult one. Farmers spend a lot of time in their farms to weed around, prune and irrigate their crops. Depending on the severity of rainfall in a particular year, those farmers whose farms are on low lands sometimes have to manually dig trenches to re- direct the flow of water from their farms. You don’t do it, and you and your household will go hungry until the next farming season.

It’s not easy to clear a land and sow but nurturing a crop to maturity is indeed very hard and it takes a determined heart to achieve that. During my time in the village, I witnessed many instances where farmers planted but when it was harvesting time and because that they had nothing to pluck. Their farms taken over by harmful and thorny weeds, and the few crops that stood the test of time would have been consumed by rodents, usually grass cutters and porcupines.

Farmers who sowed, spent time on their farms to nurture their crops, and harvested on time were the ones that went home happy at the end of the day.

The ones who for some unknown reasons did not sow at all or sowed late, did not make the effort to nurture their crops or did not harvest on time, were the ones who would lament about how the poor and changing weather pattern had affected them. They would blame their fate on some mysterious crop. Excuses, explanations, reasons!!

Life in my village mainly revolves around this repetitive principle of SOW, NURTURE and REAP and only those who diligently live by this principle are the ones who are able to feed themselves lives and their dependents.

My brothers and sisters, generally, life is not very different from the Kwamoano principle of sow, nurture and reap. We are what we are today because of our decisions and actions yesterday. What we spend our time on today will result into what becomes of us tomorrow. It’s that simple!

Ecclesiastes 3:1-2 is one of the over-used Bible verses in Ghana today; ‘there is a time for everything……..time to sow and time to reap’. Everyone believes that their time to reap would come someday, and that’s indeed true but here is the catch: you can only reap the fruit of the seed you have sowed.

You have an exams coming up, you can choose to stick your backside down and study or you can allow yourself to be deceived by the hungry prophet in the corner down the street to ‘sow’ a seed of money in his church, go to sleep and expect to pass.

You are a young graduate with the hope that the day of landing your dream job would become a reality one day, but due to the false sense of entitlement that society has fed into your brains, you invest no effort into putting together a great CV. You will not bother to research into how to prepare, dress and kill it at job interviews but you sit and play computer game or stay on Snapchat all day and think that ‘your time go come’. That would be wishful thinking!

You recently lost a job, yes! Guess what, you are not the only one who has lost a job. You are at liberty to get up, repackage and face life squarely or you can sit down and play the victim all the time and expect that somehow, heaven will open and drop down manna for you. Good luck!

If you spend the whole of your today lamenting on how life has not treated you fairly and how the witches and wizards in your family have gone ahead of you into every job and business, then please allow me to remind you that you are sowing a seed of failure and you would reap misery tomorrow.

It has been said many times that the difference between the poor and the successful is the usage of time. We all, rich or poor, have 86400 seconds in one day. You can choose to invest yours wisely today knowing that you will reap what you sow or you can choose to let yours pass you by wastefully so you can blame your pathetic tomorrow on the uncivilized gods of your village.

I challenge you to make an effort to shun whine-masters and sow some positive-thinking friends into your life and you will surely reap some great positive results. Moaning is a waste of time!

Life is a series of investments (sowing) and as I learnt in Business School, it’s only those who invest in the right portfolio at the right time and sacrifice to wait that will reap the most handsome returns.

Success is more than luck, buddy. It takes a genuine desire and conscious but calculated daily actions to achieve it. I’ve resolved to sow a positive seed every day and I am very confident that my days of reap are beckoning.

As the son of a farmer, I’m very much aware that not every sown-seed would bear fruit but I’d sow anyway. If you are fired up and ready to go, then let’s go seed-sowing together and let’s do it now.

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Steve is a Mechanical Engineer and currently works as the Maintenance Planning & Systems Superintendent at Perseus Mining Ghana Limited. He's passionate about shaping the minds of the next generation to make our country and the world better than we met it. He's a speaker and loves to write.