No column today; 2014 review

There’s no column today because of the holidays–although in 2015, I’ve been told, the Globe Magazine will publish every Sunday of the year and not take the traditional Christmas and Independence Day weeks off.

2014 has been one heck of a year. Our apartment was renovated and we lived in it during the renovation, which was a test of our organizational and couplehood skills. I got cast in the role of a lifetime at the JP Footlights Club–the six psychiatrists in “Reckless,” all with different accents! and cardigans!–and had to resign when my mother broke her hip, way out in the Ozarks, the night before we went into tech. Our beloved Milo dog died of lymphoma in early April.

Instead of making my Boston theatrical debut onstage, I made it offstage when I got pressed into assistant-directing the Ig Nobel Opera this year. My husband gave a TEDMed talk. I co-authored a cover story for Harvard Business Review. The Globe and Boston.com split up, so I lost my old blog, but I started blogging again here on the intersection of science and the performing arts. We took an amazing vacation to the southwest.

Mixed bag, is what I’m saying. Lots of upheaval, yet at the end of the day, we are muchly where we started. Living at the same address, albeit in a different and vastly improved arrangement of rooms. Continuing to manage our parents’ circumscribed yet complex lives, and learning more than we ever wanted to know about Medicaid eligibility. Temporarily dogless. Mr. Improbable are both still thinking and writing and saying (hopefully) funny and insightful things about science and art and everyday life, (hopefully) for money.

One of the useful concepts I’ve learned at my HBS job is explore versus exploit. No organization, and certainly no individual, can dedicate time and energy to every possible worthwhile endeavor. What you want to do is balance exploration and exploitation. Exploitation isn’t meant to have a nasty connotation–it simply means doing the stuff you, or your multinational corporation, are already doing, but doing it better, faster, cheaper, more effectively. Exploiting the resources already at your command so that they have greater impact. Fine-tuning. Exploration, by contrast, is going into the unknown, investing time and effort and resources with no clear ROI.

My New Year’s resolutions, such as they are, can all be categorized as explore versus exploit. Trying to do better at my current jobs–make more connections, increase my readership, get more publicity, throw more dinner parties–that’s exploitation. Most of my writing and thinking about science/theater–this blog, an upcoming conference on science and theater, ideas for actors to interview and stories to pitch–that’s all on the “explore” side. I don’t know what I want this science/theater business to turn into yet–an arts-reporting gig? A grant-funded blog? A part-time administrative position somewhere? And I don’t have to, yet. That’s the beauty of assigning something entirely to the “explore” side.

Get better at what you do, and then try something else. Simple, really.

What are your 2015 resolutions?