I recently got a new electric shaver. It had been a long time coming.

I put off shopping for a new shaver because the previous one was doing the job, just not well. I had no idea how poorly it was working until I started using the new one. It was more than just being new and functioning well — I was able to use the best tool for the job at hand.
The new unit has different heads for different shaving jobs: a coarse toothed head equivalent to my old shaver, a fine toothed head, an ear trimmer, and a foil shaver. While I’ve already decided the latter two are unlikely to see much use I’m happy with having twice as many tools as before.

I can see the parallels to my learning skills. I was doing fine with the haphazard way I’d learned to read. In fact I discovered I read faster than almost everyone I knew. Yet when I started learning speed reading techniques I was able to really crank up the rate at which I consumed written materials. And the fun part is that my comprehension generally increased as my speed increased.

Now I have multiple tools for working with words. I can either plod along at about twice the average reading speed or I can apply a few quick techniques and double or triple your reading speed.

Where in your life are you slow to invest in new tools because “that’s the way we’ve always done it”?