I saw this logo while riding my mountain bike crossing some railroad tracks in Northern Idaho – The Great Northern Railroad. It is a great image representing of the feat that Railroad Companies had to overcome laying track across the Northern Rockies. Although the use of animals is common among logo creators, few use the Rocky Mountain Mountain Goat.

Consider the ubiquity of animals like lions, bulls, and eagles in logos. They certainly share a common meaning with us all. But the risk that companies take when using animal representations in logos is that they compromise uniqueness in branding.  Other companies selling bicycles and outdoor apparel have used the mountain goat image, but none are as strong the Great Northern Railway logo.

Who is your Inunnguaq? The Icon of Hope is a Gift of Gratitude for someone who has helped you on our journey.

The Inuit people of Northern Canada build stone structures to point the way across desolate tundra and ice. Sometimes built in the shape of a man, they are called Inunnguaq. These stone sentinels can save a life on the harsh, frozen landscape where few survive alone.

These stones are called INUNNGUAQ (pronounced EEN-NON-WOK). They are  used by the Inuit people of the icy tundra of  Northern Canada. Stacked stones “in the shape  of a man” – the meaning of Inunnguaq – are a landmark and survival guide for travelers on a journey.

They are placed from one horizon to the next.  The Inuit erect these stones out of love for fellow travelers – people they may never know.  They say, “You are on the right path…you arenot alone.

Express your appreciation to that person who has shown you the way.

Join the movement. Share the Icon of Hope. Let there be 1,000,000 Icons of Hope in the World.

Yes, I LOVE Basketball.  My dad was a basketball coach. I love the headiness of the game. Basketball is a sport where game knowledge, savvy, and scrapiness will trump talent. I am not an raw athlete – I can’t jump and I’m skinny. When I walk on the court with a bunch of other players who don’t know my game I barely get a look. I know the fundamentals and I am a disciplined player. My wife will say I am very aggressive; I say that I just play hard. I give a crap. I don’t like being a lazy player.

Over the years I have come to enjoy that kind of “disrepect” because I often flip it into being the go-to guy. Many aspects of life are like that. People judge the outside because they can’t calibrate the head and the heart. You gotta be in the game before they know the real you.

Knowledge, fundamentals, discipline, and effort. That is a great recipe for success. However, you don’t gain knowledge unless you play the game.  You don’t perfect the fundamentals unless you play the game. Discipline and effort are not exercised until you are in the game.  If you are serious about what you want to do with your life then GET IN THE GAME and give it everything you have. Then someday you might be a champion.

Go Butler!

Make a symbol about something you love at Mikons.com. Then share with others how your love made you a champion.

The Christian Cross is bleeds with symbolism.  Today, this Friday, is called Good Friday.  It is the day that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified.  The cross now symbolizes the atonement of man to God. 

However, it’ adoption has a rich history of politics, lust, goodness, and holiness. Below is an excerpt of an interpretation called the “Cross of Christ”.  Click on that title to read the full article.  It is well written and even provocative.  Consider this: Jesus lived the crucifiction leaving us the symbol to metaphorically die to our selfish selves to be at one with God – atonement (at one ment). 

 There is a long history of Christians using the symbol of the cross in superstitious and mystical ways.   The earliest Christians seem to have repudiated the use of the cross as a symbol. This because the cross was a despised execution instrument. Would we want to wear a gold-plated noose or gallows had Jesus been hanged, or a gold-plated guillotine had Jesus been beheaded, or a gold-plated electric-chair had Jesus been electrocuted, or a gold-plated syringe had Jesus been lethally injected? It is not difficult to understand their aversion to using the cross as a symbol.
Mankind has always utilized symbols to give expression to their abstract ideas. Early Christians developed a symbol of the fish because the Greek word for fish, ichthus, was used as an acrostic for “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” The dove was used as a symbol of the Holy Spirit. The first two letters of the Greek word for Christ, Christos, were formed together as a chi-rho symbol for Christ. The primary emphasis of early Christian preaching was the resurrection-life of Jesus Christ, for which a symbol was difficult to find. The empty cross became a symbol to show that Jesus had been raised from the dead, and it eventually became the predominant Christian symbol. The first record of its use is found during the second century. Clement of Alexandria wrote, “we mark the brow with the sign of the cross.14 There is also evidence that the gesture of the cross and material objects in the form of a cross were used as early as the second century as ritual fetishes to ward off evil, a practice which was condemned.

   The cross as a symbol was further entrenched as the primary symbol of Christian religion after the Roman emperor, Constantine, claimed to have seen a flaming cross of light in the sky with the words, “By this sign conquer.” He henceforth merged Christian religion with his political aspirations using the symbol of the cross. Constantine’s mother, Helena, is alleged to have travelled to Palestine in 325 A.D. and she claimed to have discovered the original wooden cross on which Jesus was crucified. The criteria for the claim was that a sick person had grasped the wood and was allegedly healed. Small fragments were transported back to Rome and sold to wealthy believers as priceless relics. There were not enough to supply the demand so they claimed “the miracle of the multiplication of the cross” whereby many more splinters from the cross were allegedly formed. It is reported that wood fragments existed in Roman Catholic churches around the world sufficient to construct many crosses.

   The problem with symbols is that since they are more tangible than the abstract reality, religious people tend gradually to superstitiously worship the symbol and lose sight of the reality on which it is based. This, of course, is the essence of idolatry. Symbols become amulets, magical charms, holy hardware. They are used as fetishes, believed to have magical power to aid or protect when rubbed, worn, or otherwise utilized. Symbols can also become conceptual fetishes, mental objects of irrational reverence and obsessive devotion. A.W. Tozer remarked that idolatry “begins in the mind and may be present where no overt act of worship has taken place.” It is this latter practice of using the cross as an ideological idol that we shall continue to explore.

   For many centuries the idea of the cross and the action of Christ’s crucifixion have been considered as if they were an on-going living reality. The concept of the cross has been enlivened, empowered, personified and deified…. click here to read more of this article.

The Cross has had many treatments over the centuries of fissures and factions.  Look here at many styles of crosses explained in Wikipedia.

You give little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give. — Kahlil Gibran, from The Prophet

Do you see that logo?  What comes to mind when you look at it.  Witness what you think as look at it.  Notice that you bring all your biases to bear as you take inventory of your feelings while you look this now iconic logo.

Now, move your political disposition aside and watch this video by Bill Whittle fo PJTV.  If are attached to the polarity of our contemporary political scene then you will either rejoice at the message or revile it.  But if you put yourself in the place of an observer, then will understand the point of the title of this post.

Whatever your biases are beware of what you believe.

Explore the power of icons for yourself at www.Mikons.com and www.MikonMixers.com.

Seth Godin wrote another compelling blog yesterday about the Cliche.  Read it before you read what I will have to say because I  may offend you if you are attached to context.

Let’s take  for example, much of the Western Hemisphere’s cliche view of the Swastika.  That iconic image for many is pregnant with pain and suffering.  That image was usurped by the Nazi’s and came to symbolize ravenous destructive power and genocide.

However, that image also symbolizes universal harmony to a Buddhist; to a Hindu it is a holy symbol representing the evolution of the universe; to the Japanese, it is a common road map symbol demarking an intersection; to some Native Americans it refered to the healing nature of the universe.   Wikipedia has an interesting narrative on the past and present cultural meanings of the equilateral cross broken at right angles.

Know this: Symbols are a gateway to meaning and connection.  However, you choose the meaning that you want to be connected to.  Look closely at that – what you connect yourself to.  Certainly, lives are lived in the context of experiences.  It is the great person, however, who can transcend the experiences of their lives that make themselves meaningful. On my New Year Day post  I tell the story of Victor Frankl, a survivor of  Auschwitz, who illustrates just that. 

Getting stuck in a cliche makes my world small.  Challenging cliches makes for possibilities for new experiences and new understanding.  I pray that I have the courage to make and meet such challenges and experiences.

Mona Lizard

I subscribe to Seth Godin’s blog.  I have read many of his books and am always taken by the simplicity of his insights.  This blog post by Seth dates back to late January, but has stuck with me.  It is about Courage and being Brand You.  Being YOU happens when you exercise the courage to stare down our own biology and begin to become YOU.  Here is what Seth has to say.

How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior?We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don’t read that book the boss lent us.

The contradictions never end. When someone shows up and acts without contradiction, we’re amazed. When an athlete just does the sport, or when a writer just writes the words, we can’t help but watch, astonished at the purity of their actions. Why is it so difficult to do what we say we’re going to do?

The lizard brain.

Or as Stephen Pressfield describes it, the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer’s block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn’t stay on the same page long off to get something out the door.

The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That’s because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.

The lizard is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because her lizard brain told her to.

Want to know why so many companies can’t keep up with Apple? It’s because they compromise, have meetings, work to fit in, fear the critics and generally work to appease the lizard. Meetings are just one symptom of an organization run by the lizard brain. Late launches, middle of the road products and the rationalization that goes with them are others.

The amygdala isn’t going away. Your lizard brain is here to stay, and your job is to figure out how to quiet it and ignore it. This is so important, I wanted to put it on the cover of my new book. We realized, though, that the lizard brain is freaked out by a picture of itself, and if you want to sell books to someone struggling with the resistance (that would be all of us) best to keep it a little more on the down low.

Now you’ve seen the icon and you know its name. What are you going to do about it?

Are you looking for that symbolic iconic image of YOU?  Go to Mikons.com and create the Brand YOU!