Chasing pidgeys

In the game Pokémon Go, pidgeys are pokémon that you see everywhere. They’re super common, super small. They are not very powerful. You’d be hard pressed to win any gym battle with them.

When I started playing the game, I quickly stopped collecting them because, well, I had them already. And they seemed useless.

But I was wrong. And now I chase after them all the time.

There are a lot of different resources in Pokémon Go, but one is experience. You “level up” as a player with a certain number of experience points. One of the ways to get experience points is to evolve pokémon, and you get quite a lot of experience for doing so. It turns out that pidgeys are cheap to evolve. A few other pokémon are just as cheap, but they are much less common, and harder to catch.

Thus, what looks like something trivial and boring turns out to be one of the most reliable ways to advance in the game.

It occurred to me that this is a good metaphor for careers, including academic careers. Much of your success comes from chasing pidgeys: the boring, mundane tasks that you have to do a lot of, and that earn little recognition individually. Grading assignments, getting reviews back to editors, going to meetings, consistently working on papers.

(This post inspired by a student in General Biology who asked me what level I was at in Pokémon Go and whether I’d caught Raikuo yet.)

Picture from here.