Alignment

Read a good post on alignment today. It is really, really important to align your goals with what you can reasonably expect. I'm not talking about giving up on your dreams of moving out of "small business" status to "big business". I'm not talking about lowering your expectations, just making them aligned with where you are headed.
An example - GGE write speculative cross genre fiction. I don't think anything we do will EVER be featured by Oprah. I don't see us winning a Newberry Award.
What do I hope for? That there is some number of people, between 1 and 1000 who would also like to read books about Superheroes, Zombies, Monsters, Dragons, Wizards, Cowboys and/or Ninjas when they all exist in the same world. A world where magic can happen and the unbelievable becomes more commonplace. I hope someone else thinks stories about King Arthur should be re-written like modern fantasy stories with modern fantasy elements and maybe a bit less of "who was he really?"
Steven Pressfield maintains that the Artist, like the Warrior only has a right to the labor/work he or she is doing, not the fruits of that labor (he's paraphrasing the Bhagavad Gita). What he is saying though is right in line with my post about alignment. The artist or creative does his or her art because that is what he or she is. If rewards come, great, but if not, then the professional artist (highly paid or not) understands that the art is what it is all about.

Don't get discouraged and never, EVER give up on our dreams. Just align your expectations with your most likely results...and whatever those aligned results look like? Double your expectation.