I went to high school with a robot.

His name was Phil.

He was very lifelike. Even at a close distance, he seemed like an ordinary high school boy.

Okay, Phil was a human high school boy, but he was anything but ordinary.

Phil was gifted. And not in the mom bragging at the country club that her son got into the gifted program kind of gifted.

I think Phil was given superpowers at birth.

His brain seemed to have gotten a software update the rest of us skipped, and he had both a photographic memory and perfect pitch.

Needless to say he was a phenomenal student and very smart kid.

The human pitch pipe.

Though he was a few years older than I, Phil and I were in the same high school choir. I remember testing his perfect pitch by playing notes on the piano and he would tell us not just what note it was, but how out of tune it was.

Charlie Puth has the same gift. Here is context for how crazy it is:

His perfect pitch was perfect.

One quick aside: Phil’s abilities shined most brightly in the sight reading part of Solo and Ensemble. If you have never done high school music stuff, this means you and your classmates go to some local college and are handed a piece of music you have never seen and asked to sing without hearing it. It’s a test of how well you can read - and hear - music. It’s very difficult.

Phil would famously take one glance at a piece of sheet music, hand it back to the judge and sing it perfectly.

It was both amazing and annoying.

The problem with perfection

As amazing as Phil was, he was also the greatest problem for our choir. His perfect ear was an incredible anchor for the group at the start of every piece, but halfway in, when the group had collectively shifted the slightest bit flat or sharp, Phil became out of tune. Not scientifically, but relative to the group.

And that was a problem.

Because the audience also didn’t have perfect pitch, the perception of the music was that one of our members couldn’t stay on key.

Even though it was precisely the opposite.

And we created dissonance.

The difference between right and right is sometimes miles.

We are the heroes of our own stories.

No matter how much empathy you have, you can never truly understand what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes.

We spend a massive amount of resources debating good and evil. Right and wrong. Justice and injustice.

The sobering truth is that it is all relative.

To our unique point of view, we might seem right. Or just. Or good.

Millions of lives have been lost in battles where both armies thought they were the hero.

So what do we do?

In the words of Anna from Frozen 2, “the next right thing.”

We can do our best to do our work honestly.

To understand that our view is only our own.

And to make the world a better place.

Starting by patching the cracks in our own foundation.

Not everyone else’s.

That was a little heavy, here’s a funny video.

be good.

z