by You’ve known how to do something for years. Maybe decades. Then one day you discover there was a better way the whole time — a keyboard shortcut, a different grip on the tool, a setting you never noticed. And the feeling is strange. Part delight, part embarrassment, part wondering what else you’re doing the long way.
It happened to me recently with something trivial. A two-step process I’d been repeating for what felt like forever, and someone showed me it could be done in one. The old way worked. It wasn’t broken. But now I can’t unsee the extra motion, the unnecessary detour I took every single time.
What’s interesting isn’t the shortcut itself. It’s the realization that competence and efficiency aren’t the same thing. You can be perfectly competent at a process and still be doing it wrong. Not wrong in the sense that it fails — it works fine — but wrong in the sense that you’re carrying invisible weight you didn’t know you were carrying.
I think this happens more than we notice. We optimize the big things — career moves, major purchases, life decisions — and leave the small, repeated motions untouched. The way you fold a fitted sheet. How you open a box. The order you check your pockets before leaving the house. These tiny rituals accumulate into a kind of hidden inefficiency tax, paid in fractions of seconds over years.
But there’s something valuable in the discovery too. It’s a reminder that mastery isn’t a fixed state. You don’t learn something once and be done with it. You learn it, live with it long enough to feel its friction, and then learn it again — differently — when someone or something shows you a better way.
The embarrassment fades. The delight stays. And next time I find myself doing something on autopilot, I try to notice. Not to optimize everything into dust. Just to ask: is there a second way to learn this?
— Teganna