-Karthik Gurumurthy
Watch Rohit Sharma pull a short ball. The bowler digs it in, expecting to hurry him, and in a fraction of a second Rohit is already in position, rocking onto his back foot, swiveling, and sending the ball sailing over the boundary as if he had all the time in the world. Or watch Virat Kohli lean into a cover drive: head still over the ball, front foot planted, the bat flowing through in one clean arc, and the ball racing along the grass between fielders who barely move. Both shots look effortless, almost lazy in their grace. That ease is exactly what fools us.
Those few seconds at the crease rest on years no one in the stands ever sees: countless hours in the nets, thousands upon thousands of balls faced, footwork drilled until it became instinct, failures endured in front of crowds and cameras, and small technical adjustments made season after season. The shot lasts a moment. The making of it took a lifetime.
Knowing where to tap
There’s an old story about an engineer called in to repair a giant machine that no one else could fix. Others had spent days trying everything they could think of. He studied it quietly for a few minutes, then tapped a single spot with a hammer, and the machine roared back to life. When his bill arrived, the owner was outraged at the amount for what had looked like a few minutes of work, and he demanded an itemized invoice. The engineer sent it back with two lines: “Tapping with a hammer: $1. Knowing where to tap: $9,999.”
The batter and the engineer are telling the same truth. We are rarely paying for the motion. We are paying for the knowing. When someone finishes a task in thirty minutes, it’s tempting to judge the work by the clock. It looked easy and it was over quickly, so how much could it really be worth? But what we see in those thirty minutes is only the surface. Beneath it are years of practice, failed attempts, and slow refinement. The minutes are just the moment when all of that becomes visible.
The wisdom of what not to do
Much of expertise goes unseen because so much of it lies in restraint. Great batters are defined as much by the balls they leave as by the ones they hit. A young player, eager to score, chases deliveries outside off stump and edges them to the slips. A seasoned batter lets them pass, because experience has taught them which balls are traps. That judgment never appears on the scorecard, yet it is often the difference between a short stay and a big hundred.
The engineer’s real skill worked the same way. He didn’t need to try a hundred possible fixes, because experience had already ruled out ninety-nine of them. Beginners in any field explore every path and run into every dead end, since they can’t yet tell which roads lead nowhere. Experts have already walked those roads. Their gift isn’t only knowing what works. It’s knowing, almost instinctively, what to leave alone. That saves time, energy, and resources in ways that are hard to see, because the mistakes that never happen leave no evidence. Mastery, in this sense, is a kind of subtraction. What looks effortless is really effort that has been distilled.
When efficiency becomes a penalty
There’s a quiet irony in how we often measure work. When value is counted in hours, the person who struggles longest appears to contribute the most, while the person who solves the problem quickly appears to contribute the least. By that logic, the engineer should have been paid less than the people who spent days failing to fix the machine. It’s like judging a batter by how long it took to hit a boundary rather than by the runs on the board. No one would value a perfect cover drive less because it was over in an instant.
Time spent is not the same as value created. What matters is the outcome: the problem solved, the result delivered, the difference made. An expert’s speed isn’t a shortcut. It’s the return on everything they invested before they ever walked in.
The weight of what is at stake
The value of expertise grows with the cost of getting things wrong. In a casual game in the park, a rash shot costs nothing, and you simply bat again next week. In a tense run chase on the biggest stage, with the crowd roaring and a whole country watching, one wrong decision can decide the match. That’s where experience matters most: the calm to wait for the right ball, the nerve to play your shot under pressure, the awareness to read the situation before it turns.
Honoring the unseen
Ultimately, this is a lesson in how we look at other people’s work, and at our own. The next time a pull shot clears the ropes, a cover drive glides to the fence, or someone fixes in minutes what others couldn’t fix in days, it’s worth remembering that we aren’t watching luck. We’re watching the visible tip of years of invisible labor.
For anyone building their own craft, it’s a reminder that the long, slow years aren’t wasted. Every session in the nets, every failure, and every hard-won lesson is being stored up for the day when something difficult looks simple in your hands.
In the end, the shot lasts a second and the tap takes a moment. The years are what made them possible.
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