Hello Fellow Technophiles,
I know I will sound like an old fuddy-duddy when I say this, but it seems like every day people need things faster and faster. While it was once considered acceptable to wait several minutes to load a website, we now expect to be able to watch video in full HD with no buffering using only a 3G cellular signal. There are things you can do to make your Mac faster: upgrade to a solid-state drive (see Ben’s article below), add more RAM (won’t actually make it faster, but may reduce the amount of beach-balling that you experience), buy a brand new state-of-the-art Mac Pro, and so on.
On the other hand, there is a free way to improve your efficiency: shortcuts. There are many, many keyboard shortcuts on the Mac and you can even customize them by going to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts. From there you can press the + button and add a shortcut for any existing menu item in any application.
My best advice is to learn these as you go. In every menu, if there is an existing shortcut, the shortcut is displayed next to the menu item. The next time you go into a menu to do something, take note of the shortcut and instead of clicking, close the menu and use the shortcut instead. In no time at all, you will be flying around your Mac!