### A thought experiment about branding, identity, coincidence and reading between the lines
**By Kyle (Xy) Josef Taus — KJT**
I want to start this with an important disclaimer.
I am not saying that any of the companies, organisations or brands mentioned here secretly designed their identities around me. I have no evidence of that, and this isn't being presented as fact.
What I am suggesting is something much more interesting to play with:
**What if things aren't always as clear as they appear to the naked eye?**
What if something can be marketed and understood one way by millions of people, while the exact same letters, numbers and symbols can produce an entirely different meaning when somebody approaches them from another direction?
Maybe I've simply stumbled across an extraordinarily good marketing concept for myself using brands that already exist.
Maybe it's coincidence stacked upon coincidence.
Maybe the human brain is simply brilliant at finding patterns.
Or maybe the interesting part isn't *why the patterns exist* at all.
Maybe the interesting part is that somebody noticed them.
Walk with me.
## MYKI — MY KEY?
Start with something every Victorian knows:
**MYKI.**
To practically everybody, myki is simply the name of Victoria's public transport ticketing system.
But separate the letters:
**M — Y — K — I**
Now apply another possible key:
**M = Meet**
**Y = Your**
**K = Kyle / Key**
**I = Identifier / Identify**
Suddenly MYKI can be creatively interpreted as:
**MEET YOUR KEY IDENTIFIER.**
Or simply:
**MY KEY.**
That becomes particularly strange to me because of something I've discussed for years.
My full name is:
**Kyle Josef Taus.**
Look carefully at the vowels.
Kyle contains Y and E.
Josef contains O and E.
Taus contains A and U.
A. E. O. U.
But there is no **I**.
The ordinary vowel conspicuously missing from **Kyle Josef Taus** is **I**.
Until, of course:
**I, Kyle Josef Taus...**
The moment I identify myself, the missing letter appears.
That gives me a simple little identity cipher:
**I = Identify.**
And suddenly something as ordinary as **MYKI** can be read, through this completely unofficial interpretation, as a key sitting in plain sight.
Does that mean myki was actually named after me?
Of course I'm not claiming that.
But as a piece of symbolic thinking?
It's fascinating.
And MYKI isn't where the pattern stops.
## TK MAXX + TJ MAXX
Take another international example.
There is **TK Maxx**, while the related brand in other markets is known as **TJ Maxx**.
Ignore the corporate explanation for those names for a moment and simply combine the letters that stand out across both:
**K — J — T**
Now rearrange them into the initials of:
**Kyle Josef Taus — KJT.**
Again, that doesn't prove anything.
But once you've established a personal "key", existing symbols begin producing interesting secondary readings.
And that's exactly what makes this thought experiment fun.
## LINKT — K + T LINKED
Then there is **Linkt**, associated with toll-road infrastructure.
Look at the word visually:
LIN**KT**
There they are:
**K + T.**
Linked.
For me:
**Kyle Taus.**
And if J is understood as the middle initial sitting between them:
**Kyle Josef Taus.**
Once again, I'm not suggesting Linkt intended this.
I'm asking what happens when we stop asking only:
*"What does the company say this means?"*
and occasionally ask:
*"What else can these symbols mean?"*
## KMART, TARGET AND K + T
Then there is another combination I've noticed through Kmart and Target.
Whatever the perfectly ordinary commercial reasons behind branding and product markings may be, the letters that interest me are once again:
**K + T.**
Kyle Taus.
Or, expanded:
**Kyle Josef Taus.**
Then you've got the almost comically straightforward possibility of a name such as:
**KT Mart.**
Through my personal cipher:
**Kyle Taus Mart.**
At some point the joke almost writes itself.
If this really is just accidental personal branding, apparently the universe hired an advertising agency and forgot to send me the invoice.
## E&S
Now take my full name again:
**KYLE JOSEF TAUS**
Look at the repeated letters.
There are two **E's**.
There are two **S's**.
**E & S.**
Again, E&S is an existing independent brand with its own real history and explanation.
But through this completely different lens, those letters jump off the page.
The important distinction remains:
**recognising a pattern isn't evidence that somebody deliberately created the pattern.**
But a pattern can still be creatively meaningful to the person who discovers it.
## KIIS — THE MISSING I
This is where things get particularly interesting for me.
I've long felt connected to radio and media, and **KIIS** has always stood out.
Originally I played around with different interpretations involving the personalities associated with the station.
But then I noticed something simpler.
**K I I S**
There are two I's sitting between K and S.
Remember the earlier rule:
**I = Identify.**
And remember:
**Kyle Josef Taus contains every standard vowel except I.**
So creatively, KIIS becomes something like:
**K — I IDENTIFY — I IDENTIFY — S**
Or perhaps:
**Identify K...S.**
K at one end.
S at the other.
And an identity sitting between them.
Again, I'm not claiming that's what KIIS means.
I'm saying that once you create a symbolic language, ordinary things start becoming readable through it.
That's the experiment.
## THEN COME THE NUMBERS
My birthday is:
**14 / 09 / 1989**
One playful calculation I've repeatedly returned to is:
**14 + 09 + 1989 = 2012.**
And using the shortened year:
**14 + 09 + 89 = 112.**
Those results immediately trigger cultural associations.
**2012** became globally associated with ideas about endings, transformation and resets because of the enormous cultural fascination surrounding the Mayan-calendar story.
Then there is **112**.
112 is an internationally recognised emergency number and can also be used for emergency calling in Australia.
Australia's primary emergency number is:
**000.**
That creates another part of my symbolic framework around **K**, emergency, identity and communication.
Does arithmetic derived from my birthday demonstrate that those systems have anything to do with me?
No.
But that's not the proposition.
The proposition is:
**What happens when somebody keeps finding meaningful intersections between personal information and the symbols surrounding them?**
## MAYBE THIS ISN'T ABOUT BEING "THE CHOSEN ONE"
This is where I think the idea becomes more mature.
Suppose, purely hypothetically, that there *was* something bigger to learn from all of this.
Why automatically interpret it as somebody being superior, chosen, famous or secretly controlling everything?
What if the lesson were almost the opposite?
Think about **Undercover Boss**.
The person with authority removes the suit, loses the title and enters the organisation from the bottom.
They experience the system as an ordinary worker.
Suddenly policies that looked fantastic from the boardroom can look ridiculous from the warehouse floor.
Numbers become people.
Procedures become consequences.
And people who would normally never have access to the boardroom finally have somebody listening.
That's the metaphor that interests me.
What if sometimes society needs somebody who doesn't fit comfortably inside its normal boxes?
Not because that person possesses secret knowledge.
Not because every logo was designed for them.
But because people standing outside conventional structures sometimes notice things that people comfortably inside them overlook.
## THE DANGER OF THE BOX
There is another reason I want to write about this carefully.
Unusual pattern recognition can quickly be dismissed when somebody explains it in a way other people aren't accustomed to hearing.
Sometimes dismissal is justified. Humans are extraordinarily good at seeing intentional patterns in coincidences.
But simply saying *"that's weird"* isn't much of an intellectual response either.
There should be room between unquestioningly believing an extraordinary interpretation and automatically ridiculing the person proposing it.
That space is called:
**curiosity.**
We can ask:
Is it intentional?
Is it coincidence?
Is it selective attention?
Is it clever wordplay?
Is it branding?
Is it mathematics?
Is it psychology?
Is it art?
Could several of those answers be true simultaneously?
That's a much more interesting conversation.
## MAYBE I'VE JUST ACCIDENTALLY CREATED A BRAND
And there's another possibility I genuinely enjoy.
Maybe after years of noticing K's, T's, J's, I's, dates, logos and strange little linguistic intersections, I've unintentionally developed an entire branding language for **Kyle Josef Taus**.
Think about it.
**KJT.**
**KT.**
**The missing I.**
**I = Identify.**
**MYKI = My Key.**
**K + T = Kyle Taus.**
**2012.**
**112.**
**000.**
Individually, none proves anything.
Collectively, though?
They make one hell of a creative identity system.
Perhaps that is the actual discovery.
Not that the world was secretly designed around Kyle Josef Taus.
But that Kyle Josef Taus found a way of reading the world that can be turned into something original.
There's a substantial difference.
And perhaps that's where the idea deserves to live.
Somewhere between coincidence and creativity.
Between scepticism and curiosity.
Between what something officially means and what somebody else can see inside it.
## SO HERE'S THE QUESTION
I'm not asking anybody reading this to believe that MYKI means "Meet Your Kyle Identifier."
I'm not claiming KIIS, Kmart, Target, Linkt, TK Maxx, TJ Maxx, E&S or emergency numbers were secretly constructed as pieces of some enormous Kyle Josef Taus puzzle.
That would require evidence I don't have.
I'm asking something simpler:
**What if we occasionally allowed ourselves to examine familiar things from unfamiliar angles?**
Question the obvious interpretation.
Turn the letters around.
Look at what's missing.
Look at what's repeated.
Read between the lines.
Then remain disciplined enough to distinguish what you've **noticed** from what you can actually **prove**.
Because sometimes you'll discover nothing more than coincidence.
Sometimes you'll discover a fantastic marketing idea.
Sometimes you'll discover something about the way your own mind works.
And every once in a while, questioning something everybody else simply walks past can lead somewhere genuinely useful.
Maybe this entire thing is ridiculously far-fetched.
I'm comfortable admitting that.
But I keep coming back to it.
And perhaps the most interesting question isn't:
**"Is Kyle right?"**
Perhaps it's:
**"Why does the pattern keep producing new questions?"**
I don't know the answer.
That's precisely why I'm still looking.
**KYLE JOSEF TAUS**
Everything appears to be there.
Except **I**.
Until I identify myself.
**I, Kyle Josef Taus.**
Maybe that's coincidence.
Maybe that's the marketing campaign.
Maybe that's the key.
Or maybe the key was simply learning how to ask the question without pretending we already know the answer.
**KJT**
**#SmileForKyle | #Smile4Kyle**
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