Too Many Words, Too Little Time: Reading, Retention & Real-Life Learning
Vonda opens with a confession: she reads, and then... nothing sticks. If it's about flowers, she's all in — but hand her a leadership book at bedtime and she's asleep before the ideas land. So she brings the problem to the resident bookworm. Lori's first answer isn't a technique at all: it's a diagnosis. Vonda is a mover and a shaker — a spreadsheet, data-driven, sweep-the-garage-then-make-arrangements kind of person, not a curl-up-on-the-couch reader. "So part of it is just who God made you to be. And I challenge you to be okay with that." That's why audiobooks work for her: on a walk, there's no email, no computer, no flowers to design. It's not an excuse — it's knowing how your own brain works. From there, the two walk through a list of retention strategies from an article Vonda found, and Lori realizes she could have written it herself.
Stop letting yourself get pulled away — and read with a filter
Tip one: stop allowing yourself to be pulled away. Lori knows that even for her, sitting down mid-day with a Seth Godin book while two computer screens glow and the phone pings would buy her maybe five minutes of real attention. Her solution is structural: read early, before the busy part of the day starts, in her "flower chair" with every notification turned off — sometimes for a full hour.
The second half of that tip is the filter: constantly ask, how can I use this in my life? Vonda admits that if she can't answer that question, she checks out. Lori runs the same filter on purpose — every book she picks up, from Mel Robbins' Let Them on down, gets read through one lens: how does this apply to a flower shop? How would this help our members? She says it heightens her awareness of what she's reading; specific people even pop into her head as she highlights. If you're a shop owner reading business books, that's the trick — read for your shop, not just for the page count.
Make a movie, and write it by hand
Tip two: pretend you're watching a movie. Memory research says visual images are far stickier than abstract words, so visualize what you read as if it were your own memory. Lori did this instinctively in college — she'd turn her chapters into mini movies, then replay the movie during the test. She thought it was just her weird brain; it turns out it's a documented strategy. (Vonda's contribution: watch Jeopardy contestants' eyes — that little delay before they answer is them running their movie.)
Tip three: handwrite the ideas worth keeping. Lori has handwritten her way through everything from the ACT — she raised her score dramatically the second time just by studying with a pen — to Bible verses she wanted to memorize. The article backed her up with Beethoven, who kept enormous stacks of sketchbooks he claimed never to look at: writing it down was itself the act of remembering. If you write it, you'll never forget it, because you remember writing it. Which raises a fair question the hosts chew on: if today's students type everything and never read a map, is it any wonder retention suffers?
Interact, apply, teach, repeat
The rest of the list comes fast: fully interact with the book (highlight, underline, take notes), apply what you read, teach it to somebody else, then review, review, review. Lori lights up here, because this is exactly the architecture behind Flower Clique's Sales Prep 2.0 — video lessons paired with a workbook whose chapters make you go back and forth, interact, and then apply. She didn't know the "official steps" when she designed it; she just knew that's how people learn. And the teaching step is the big one — as they say in teacher school, you never really learn something until you can reteach it. In shop terms, that's role-playing with your team.
This is really about your training and your handbooks
The conversation lands somewhere every shop owner should sit with. These retention principles don't just apply to your own reading — they apply to every guidebook, handbook, and set of standards you hand your team. Lori points out that florists redoing their shop guidebooks (a live topic in the Facebook groups) keep tripping over the problem of assumption: writing things down isn't the same as making them stick. And Vonda adds a timely caution about AI: yes, it will generate a handbook for you — but you can't take the output as gospel. Run it through the same test: does it follow steps a person can visualize, interact with, apply, and reteach?
The episode closes on a nostalgic note — Pizza Hut's read-ten-books-get-a-personal-pan-pizza program, which both hosts remember signing off on for their kids, and which a book reviewer on TikTok recently recreated for himself as an adult. Maybe we all still need a little incentive. If your kids' school still rewards reading, Vonda wants to hear about it.
Key takeaways
- Know how your brain works and stop fighting it — if audiobooks on a walk are how you retain, that counts as reading.
- Kill the distractions before you start; five minutes of interrupted reading retains nothing.
- Read with a filter: keep asking "how does this apply to my shop?" and handwrite what's worth keeping.
- You haven't learned it until you can teach it — build role-play and reteaching into your team training.
- Apply the same principles to your shop handbooks (and to anything AI drafts for you): interact, apply, teach, review.