The days I have class at BYU, I work from our offices that are close to BYU campus instead of commuting back up to my normal place of work in Salt Lake City. I’ve only been working from this location for a few weeks.

The other day I walked past a book shelf and saw the book Distributed Algorithms. I pulled it off the self and started thumbing through it. Fifteen minutes later I realized that the reason I got up in the first place was to get a drink. Is I walked over to the water cooler and filled a styrofoam cup with water, I realized how absolutely geeky it is to get distracted by something like a textbook.

I got chatting with a friend of mine over IM and relayed my geeky experience to him. He sent me a quote from this speech in response:

The ability to learn is so precious a quality that it cannot disappear from the perfected man. To be able to learn is to be young, and whosoever keeps the joy of learning fresh within him remains young forever. The ignorant man is like a prisoner that languishes in a narrow cell that will become his grave, because he has not learned that the door is not locked.

I found that quote to be inspiring and I felt even better about my geekdom than ever before.