Here’s a great quote from Kristine Holmgren in an interview I read to day at MinnPost.com:

If you never go outside your peer group, you’re only going to see the world the way your peers see it.

The impact that my peers’ opinions have on my opinions is fairly obvious. If I have a conversation with someone, or several someones within my peer group wherein we share opinions and I discover that I’m in the minority, I’ll have a tendency to moderate my opinions toward theirs. It may not be 100% agreement, but a few percentage points toward theirs at least. As time passes, this happens over and over and over, not unlike the impact that water has on a seemly indestructible stone stuck in the bed of a river.

Here’s the full interview.