how to own your cliches (in writing and in life)
Seth Godin, the maestro of idea generation, posted this musing this morning about using cliches to your advantage.
be your own bridge over troubled waters
He starts with the wiki definition:
In printing, a cliché was a printing plate cast from movable type. This is also called a stereotype. When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a phrase used repeatedly as a single slug of metal. “Cliché” came to mean such a ready-made phrase. The French word “cliché” comes from the sound made when the matrix is dropped into molten metal to make a printing plate.
To save time and money, then, printers took common phrases and re-used the type.
Along the way, they trained us to understand the image, the analogy, the story. Hear it often enough and you remember it. That training has a useful purpose….
The effective way to use a cliché is to point to it and then do precisely the opposite.
Do you do this? Fret about finding the perfect holiday WITH A PURPOSE? Recently, I went around in 238974897 circles trying to find the best place to do a traditional Indian treatment. That’s what I do. I Over-research. Eventually the right answer pops up in front of me. So obvious. I didn’t want to travel to India. India ain’t good for us vatta types. But, it turns out, the first ever ( officially recognised ayurvedic wellness retreat outside of India is in Ubud, Bali at
Can’t sleep? This works. It truly does, in a gentle, lasting way. 
