What if life handed you something no one else really understood? Not your family, not the doctors with the charts, maybe not even you. There was no map for it. You just had to figure it out, one day at a time. To understand this scenario in a much deeper sense, Project Candor hosted two guests and gave us real perspectives on everyday courage.

Think about this… your life changed instantly, and you could no longer go back to what you perceived as normal. Where would you find the courage to start? What would you say to the people who told you what you’d never do again, and how would you get past them? And on the mornings when it all felt like too much, where would you find encouragement?

When people talk about courage, they usually picture something cinematic, like a burning building or a big speech with swelling music underneath it. I’ve hosted enough Project Candor conversations now to tell you that’s rarely what it looks like. The two guests in this post each had to answer those questions for real, and their answers didn’t come in one dramatic moment. They came slowly, one ordinary day at a time, with nobody filming.

A Pamphlet, a Staircase, and 200 Resumes: Ken Kunken

In 1970, Ken Kunken was a junior at Cornell, studying engineering and playing lightweight football. A single tackle during a kickoff broke his neck and left him paralyzed from the shoulders down. He spent the next nine months and twenty days in hospitals and rehabilitation centers.

Then came the career guidance. The Rusk Institute’s pamphlet for someone with his level of injury recommended selling magazine subscriptions over the telephone. Ken couldn’t even dial a rotary phone.

That pamphlet became the fuel.

Ken went back to Cornell. On his first day back, he was pulled up, and bounced down, nearly one hundred steps in a wheelchair. The campus had no ramps and no curb cuts. It hadn’t been built with him in mind. He went anyway.

He finished his engineering degree and became the first quadriplegic to graduate from the university. He went on to earn two master’s degrees, from Cornell and Columbia, and worked as a rehabilitation counselor, helping people with severe disabilities build careers of their own.

People told Ken he’d never have a career himself. At one point he mailed more than 200 resumes and was rejected by everyone. He earned his law degree from Hofstra in 1982 and became an assistant district attorney in Nassau County, the first quadriplegic to serve as one on Long Island. He practiced law for more than 40 years.

What strikes me about Ken’s story is how much of the courage happens in the boring parts. Mailing one more résumé after a pile of rejections isn’t dramatic. It’s an envelope and a stamp. I’d still put it among the bravest things I can imagine.

And then there’s the part of his story that has nothing to do with work. In his fifties, more than thirty years after his injury, Ken married Anna, who had originally been hired as his personal care attendant. She proposed. It was her idea to try for children through IVF. On January 24, 2005, Ken watched from his wheelchair as his triplets came into the world: Joey, Jimmy, and Timmy.

Ken’s guiding words are a line he once received inscribed on a glass paperweight from Senator Edward Kennedy, after testifying before the Senate:

“Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.”

— George Bernard Shaw, often quoted by Senator Robert F. Kennedy

You can hear it echoed in the title of his 2023 memoir, I Dream of Things That Never Were: The Ken Kunken Story.

Before Sunrise, Every Single Day: Jay Setchell

Jay Setchell‘s story starts on a working farm, where nothing came free.

Before sunrise he was mixing powdered milk to feed the calves, and he sorted eggs by lantern for the candling plant. He learned early that time is money, and that a job left half-done isn’t done.

He would need every bit of that. At 31, Jay broke his neck in a drowning accident in a swimming pool. He went in feet-first, not diving, and every medical prediction afterward said he would be paralyzed for good. By then he had already died twice, once at 19 while serving in the Marine Corps and again at 23, when a drunk driver hit him. The broken neck was the third time in twelve years. He has survived more than 70 surgeries since.

You can draw a straight line from those farm mornings to his recovery. After the accident, Jay walked anyway: seventeen years on leg braces, crutches, and canes, then brainstem surgeries, relearning to walk, and eighteen more years on a walker, before three rare spinal conditions eventually put him in a power wheelchair. He told me plainly that the day he decides he can’t move is the day he stops moving. Mind over matter, and he means it literally.

“Sweat dries, blood clots, and broken bones heal. Suck it up.” — Jay Setchell

(He’s a Marine Corps veteran. You may have guessed.)

Our conversation landed on ordinary, hopeful things: a business going international, eight-year-old twins to raise, another book taking shape. He also mentioned a note from one of his readers, a woman of 88 who is already planning her 95th birthday. That’s the kind of detail I love, because it’s what courage tends to leave behind: somebody else, making plans seven years out.

What Everyday Courage Actually Looks Like

Ken and Jay were injured decades apart, one on a football field and one in a swimming pool. Both broke their necks, and both were handed a forecast of what their lives would be from then on.

A serious injury tends to arrive with a script like that: what you won’t be able to do, and what kind of life is “realistic” now. The people writing that script usually mean well. The script is usually too small.

So what did they say to the naysayers? Mostly, nothing. Ken answered a pamphlet and 200 rejections with a degree, then another, then a law career. Jay answered the predictions with about thirty-five years of walking. Neither of them tore up the script in a single dramatic moment. They wore it down with repetition, and with a lot of mornings that looked exactly like the morning before.

And the encouragement? Some of it came from other people, like Anna proposing, or a reader planning her 95th birthday. A lot of it came from somewhere older: a kid with a lantern who learned that a job left half-done isn’t done, and a line on a glass paperweight about saying why not.

Neither of them waited to feel brave. They did the next hard, unglamorous thing their bodies and their circumstances asked of them, and then the one after that. Neither of them would make a very good inspirational poster, either, and I mean that as a compliment. They’re too specific for that.

I suspect you have some of that in your own story, whether it’s a diagnosis you’ve learned to live alongside or a recovery that nobody else saw up close. It might not feel like courage to you. It rarely does from the inside.

That’s a big part of why Project Candor exists. You don’t have to be famous to be fascinating. You don’t have to be a hero to have done something brave, either.

Listen In (or Pull Up a Chair)

You can hear Ken Kunken (Ship’s Log #36) and Jay Setchell (Ship’s Log #35) in full on their episode pages, or wherever you listen to podcasts, including YouTube.

And if you’ve got a story of everyday courage, yours or someone you know, I’d love to hear it whenever you’re ready. You can reach out at [email protected] or tap Become a Guest on the website. If you’d like to see who’s already pulled up a chair, Meet the Guests is a good place to start. What’s your story?

That’s Project Candor.

Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories.