Quick answer
Tend the tree and you eat from it. Serve well and the honor comes. The verse observes that patient attention gets paid, without saying when.
Read both lines
The fig tree is a good choice for the comparison because it is slow. It takes years before it produces, and the tending in between is unglamorous, so the first line already contains the argument about time. The NKJV footnotes "keeps" as protects or tends, which is guarding rather than owning.
The second line applies it to service, and the word for waiting on a master is the same guarding verb. What the saying claims is that a servant's honor arrives on the same schedule as fruit, which is to say later, and by the same mechanism, which is consistent attention nobody was watching. The book has already put a servant in a surprising position at 17:2. This is the ordinary version of that.
Related: Proverbs 17:2 · Proverbs 22:29 · Proverbs 12:11 · Proverbs 14:23
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.