Christian Watson's How Lucky Am I and the Cheerfulness Facet (E6)
Christian Watson, the artist behind the Mr. Skelly project, gathered his short reflections into How Lucky Am I, a book that keeps turning loss and difficulty toward the light. One line holds the whole spirit of it, on its book page: "How lucky am I to be broken so the light could come in." That readiness to feel grateful and find the bright side rather than the dark is, in the Big Five, one facet.
Finding the light is the Cheerfulness facet
That facet is Cheerfulness (E6), under Extraversion, the tendency to feel joy, gratitude, and optimism as a baseline rather than only when things go well. Watson writes from high E6: the reflex to look at a broken place and find, without forcing it, the opening it made. A high scorer returns to a grateful, hopeful register quickly and spots the good without trying. A lower scorer runs more level or more serious, and may find the book's relentless finding-of-light a stretch rather than a description of how they feel.
What keeps the aphorisms from being empty is that they start in the hard thing, not around it. Watson is not skipping the being-broken, he is looking for what the break let in, which is a different move than pretending the crack was not there, and it sits close to the low mood that a grateful reframe helps counter. For a lower-E6 reader the usable version is small and repeatable, naming one specific good thing inside a hard day rather than manufacturing a mood. The gratitude is partly a temperament. Watson's work suggests the noticing of it is a habit you can practice into.
Read your E6 to know how How Lucky Am I lands. If it runs high, Watson gives language to a brightness you already carry, and a way to aim it at the hard parts. If it runs low, the book is less a mirror than a method, worth borrowing the look-for-the-light habit from even if the sunny register is not your native one. The light does not erase the break. Watson keeps asking, gently, what the break let through.
Read the book: How Lucky Am I by Christian Watson.
See Where You Fall
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Research Citations
Watson, C. (2025). How lucky am I. Penguin Life.
Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), 1063-1070.
Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.
Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.