Divorce has become the quick fix solution to normal marital turbulence. Politicians watching every new poll switch long-held positions overnight. They change laws, and the very foundations on which society has come to depend and function, as quickly and easily as the voters change their positions or their channels or their spouses. Are we all nuts? Don’t we realize that good things come only with time and patience? Don’t we realize that businesses, societies, and relationships need long-term goals and plans to succeed?

I must confess that for this reason I generally keep off the Internet (in spite of my company IDT’s role as the country’s second largest independent provider of Internet services). The medium is simply too surfacy. People jump from Web site to Web site without actually ever getting into the heart of any topic. They grab just one little fact and—zap!—they hit a hot link to jet to another site in even less time than it takes till the next commercial. Sure, it’s better than the pure garbage you get from TV, but even if people are picking up random facts, is anybody really learning anything? Would someone left in front of the Internet for ten years come out as worldly as the same person left in a library? No way! Computer aficionados may hate me for saying this (and some might even cancel service with me), but I repeat: No damn way!

I can’t change everything, but three things are for sure. I’m going to keep reading, keep being a baseball fan—and pretty much ignore TV. I will keep throwing the set in the back of the car every Monday morning. And Wall Street can go to hell. I’m going to ignore the quarterly numbers and run my business for the long run. In the end, this will make them switch to me, anyway.

But back on campus, reading garbage magazines and watching mind-numbing TV programs five hours a day could not completely offset the effect of living in the Harvard environment the whole rest of the time. Slowly, inexorably, as my mannerisms and tastes were becoming slightly more upscale, so, too, were my mail-order ads. Whereas before my ads were designed only to appeal to the lowest classes ($1 horoscopes, for instance), suddenly the bent of these ads started appealing to those who, like myself, were searching to raise their status. In other words, the great middle class.

My dorm became full of endless parades of graphic artists and photographers whom I was hiring to class up my ads. Now I was selling gourmet “coffee of the month.” Years before the advent of Starbucks and Martha Stewart, we were photographing a large array of expensive coffees arranged Ralph Lauren–like on oak steps in burlap bags.