Visual Diet as a Condition for Personal Growth🚩

“If your mouth is the window to your body, in the sense that food enters the body through your mouth so that it can grow and develop, then your eyes are the window to your soul. And when you put something in your mouth and chew it, it can either benefit you or start killing you, depending on what you eat. Exactly the same is true of what you see” (G. Plitt, The X Factor)🖥.
Scrolling a news feed or reading classical philosophy — it is all about the glycemic index of that nourishment.
Sugar tastes good and sometimes you even need it, but too much of this kind of “sugar” leads to spiritual obesity.🔕

Character is acquired and shaped over the course of life just like physical form. Physical form depends on our movement, on our way of life. In the end all of this is reflected in our physique; the same goes for character: what we choose, what we pay attention to, what we allow into our consciousness and what we internalize✍️. [“I. P. Pavlov’s discovery of the mechanism of conditioned reflexes made it possible to explain how, in place of the natural system of response, a new one arises, based no longer on the laws of nature but on the conditional laws of the external situation internalized by the individual” (I. A. Mironenko, The Biosocial Problem and the Emergence of Global Psychology, p. 24)]

Eating good food makes your body stronger. The same is true of character! By absorbing the productive habits of people who have already achieved a great deal, by watching the stories of outstanding personalities, we take pieces from them and make them our own. Good visual nourishment is found in good stories — stories of people overcoming trials and hardship. (G. Plitt)

Better to see a sermon than to hear it retold.
On the road, a guide is better than a one-time explanation.
The ear hears less than the eye notices.
A living example is clearer than a great many long phrases.

“Your attitude toward everything shows itself in every action you take.
Dreams are built on discipline, discipline is built on habits, habits are built through training, and training goes on every second of your life, in every situation: when you wash the dishes, drive a car, give a presentation to an audience, listen to a lecturer in class. You either always try your hardest, or you don’t. If you haven’t rehearsed the behavior you need, you won’t be able to switch it on at the moment you need it. We train in order to create reflex responses to extraordinary circumstances. When a situation heats up, you need practiced reflexes that kick in without you having to think” (Will Smith. Chapter 16. “Purpose”)

Now, personal growth.💢

The “I” is a more or less coherent image for other people; and if we are talking about the image of a professional, that is personal branding. It is the positioning of your name so that many other people associate it with a certain meaning. A personal brand is built on the ability to communicate your identity.
Returning to the analogy with the body: when we eat 🥕, we do not turn into a carrot. We take useful substances from it — beta-carotene, for example, which improves our vision. The same happens with skills, ideas and thoughts taken from outside. We process them and build them into our personality, strengthening and developing it in the process. As a result, every person is unique and unrepeatable.)
📌“The ability to communicate your identity is a key factor of effectiveness”❗
“Branding is not fame and not a concrete thing. It is rather a metaphor for a complex phenomenon: story, meaning, identity. Is it the essence of personality? It has to do with your assets, with a complex set of qualities — behavioral features, temperament, characteristic traits of the emotional sphere and mentality — that characterize you as an individual and make you unique and different from everyone else. That is what defines a brand” (J. Sallenbacher. Creative Personal Branding: How to Find Opportunities, Develop Yourself and Stand Out, p. 170)📚
But a brand like that is inseparable from identity, and identity in turn is a consequence of many years of visual diet.

“Such brands are distinguished by authentic behavior. Something similar happens in fashion. What makes women put their names on a waiting list to get a Birkin bag from Hermès for an enormous sum? These things symbolize something people want” (p. 185)

• “Never swear off the beggar’s bag — if it’s a Birkin
• Or prison — if it’s Girkin
• So for whom does the bell toll?
• Somebody’s got delusions of grandeur —
• Okay, well, ours are within arm’s reach too
• And we’re on the shoulders of giants like dandruff
• All that’s left is to kek through clenched teeth
• Spitting into the sunset river
• On eternity’s outskirts
• Diaghilev was our Kanye in Paris
• Man has grown narrow; I’d make him wider”...(Oxxxy)🎶

And I will make him wider! 🌓⚕ In the end, personality creates itself — its own philosophy.

“It is a personal law, a philosophical justification of a way of life and a way of thinking — it acts like a sun that carries warmth, bestows blessing, nourishes with life-giving sap... A sun whose beneficent influence makes all forces blossom and ripen and does not allow them to be choked by the weeds of grief and melancholy...
And every human being must have their own philosophy, their own personal right, their own sunlight” (F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 211)

The forerunner of one’s identity, of one’s otherness, is the eyes — the window of the soul that lets in the best of other people: those close to us, our teachers, and the powerful of this world. They nourish our spirit.
“However hard you try, you cannot sweep heresy away
You cannot mow down otherness — bite me, try it😆,

another question is that here: “We’re like at home inside a snow globe: give it the slightest shake and we’re buried instantly” — but that is already a subject for a different kind of pathos...