When I read Jay Setchell’s book The Strength Within You before our interview, it stunned me. I thought to myself, “how is this man still alive?”

The answer, as I quickly discovered when Jay joined me on Lens of Hopefulness with John Passadino, is that he’s still alive because he has refused, at every possible turn, to be anything else.

Jay Setchell is a 76-year-old Marine Corps veteran, entrepreneur, author, and a living testament to resilience. He has survived 73 surgeries. He has physically died not once, not twice, but three times. And yet, there he was, talking to me with warmth, humor, and a philosophical insight that I wasn’t expecting from someone who’s been through what he’s been through. I felt a real kinship with him — not because I’ve endured anything close to what he has, but because I understood the importance of intestinal fortitude.

We started our conversation so strongly that I forgot to even introduce the show. That’s how good this conversation was.

Three Times Gone

Let me give you a sense of what Jay has survived, because numbers alone don’t do it justice.

The first critical accident happened in 1969-70, when Jay was a young Marine. A teammate on his criminal intelligence unit had been injured, and Jay was rushing him to get medical help. His friend’s wife had her arm around the injured man’s head, applying pressure, when Jay’s car slammed into an unlit truck in the pitch dark. The impact was catastrophic. Jay’s face was literally crushed into the steering wheel — his head caved in on the left side, burned, and he was put in traction for over eight and a half months. He spoke so matter-of-factly about this as if he weren’t phased.

In terms of NDEs, he said he floated above his own body, his back against the ceiling, looking down at the doctors working on him. Everything appeared red to him, and violent. He watched the doctors give up and walk away. Then a Dr. Gray — a Navy oral surgeon in white — walked in and, through some intervention Jay can barely explain, pulled him back. Jay doesn’t remember returning to his body. One moment he was above it; the next he was in a coma, able to hear voices, starting the long road back.

The second near-death was at the hands of a drunk driver who sideswiped Jay, sending his car rolling into a deep ditch. The drunk driver himself was thrown from his truck, with no seatbelt, and was killed.

The third time — and this is the one where Jay describes perhaps the most striking near-death experience in the book — happened at a pool. Jay broke four vertebrae diving into the pool feet first. He was drowning at the bottom while people around him assumed he was just goofing around. He describes the sensation in his book as being pulled down “a long endless vortex as if I was inside a tornado. No bright light, no voices, just nothing.” No tunnel. No heaven. Just gone. They dragged him out and got him to a hospital, and somehow — again — he came back.

When I mentioned to Jay that his descriptions were unlike most near-death experiences I’d heard, he agreed. He’s lived through too many versions of near-death experiences to establish a set pattern!

Because of so many accidents and surgeries, Jay has a condition called syringomyelia, along with other serious spinal diagnoses, that means — by every medical understanding — he should not be able to move anything from his shoulders down. He was a case study at the Neuro Center at Methodist and Baylor in Houston, and at Seat and Brain and Spine in Austin, where roughly 25 to 28 doctors from around the country and the world gathered to ask a single question: why is this man still moving?

His neurosurgeon, Dr. Rose — who himself was a MASH doctor in Vietnam and had seen a few things — gave them his answer. He told those assembled doctors: “Number one, he’s a Marine and he doesn’t know when to quit. And number two, he’s just stubborn.”

Jay’s next statement tied into the power of manifestation I’d heard before but this time with living proof, “I believe in the power of your mind. I believe that I can move because I think I can move and I want to move. I will myself to move. And the day that I accept the fact that I can’t move anymore, I probably won’t.”

So, a mind over matter case study sat before me, lived, tested, and won.

I asked Jay on where this grit came from. Because you don’t just wake up one day and decide to be the person who survives everything. So where does it start?

For Jay, it started on a farm in Northern Illinois. He grew up working from the age of five — mixing powdered milk for the calves at five in the morning, stepping on nails (more than once, he told me, including one that went clean through his boot and out the top), pulling weeds, hauling buckets through the snow. He talked about watching the seasons change — planting, cultivating, harvesting, resting — and how that rhythm built something in him that he carries to this day: the expectation of change, and the ability to look forward to what comes next.

“It built me up to always expect change,” he said. “Always look forward.”

He also gave me a line that provided tremendous food for thought and one that I’ll tuck away for future reference: “Sweat dries, blood clots, and broken bones heal. Suck it up.”

That may sound callous, but he’s someone who has watched himself heal from things most people will never experience and has learned — through decades of experience — that things do, in fact, get better if you keep moving.

Jay’s book is full of what I’d call tough-love philosophy, and he has a gift for turning big ideas into easy-to-understand phrases. He shared these nuggets with my listeners:

“END is not the end. It means Effort Never Dies.”

“FAIL is not failure. It means first attempt in learning. You tried. That means you didn’t fail — you started.

“NO doesn’t mean no. It means next Opportunity.”

I told Jay right there on the podcast that I was going to put those on memes and share them.

His overarching mantra — on the cover of his book and on his website — is It’s Always Too Soon to Quit. He’s been saying it for years, but when you hear it from a man who’s died three times and gotten back up each time, it’s quite effective.

I should mention that Jay isn’t just a man who survived things. He’s a man who has done things. He ran multiple businesses — car detailing, flipping Corvettes, a trucking company, and others. He was a problem-solver in management before the company medically retired him at 41. Every time a door closed on him, he looked for another one to open.

He told me something that I think summarizes his outlook better than anything:

“I don’t believe anything great ever really happens until someone’s either mad as hell or on fire with a cause.”

And after a lifetime of being both, Jay finally sat down — or rather, dictated over the course of a year his book, “The Strength Within You.” He’d been told for over 50 years to write a book and kept putting it off. He’s glad he waited, he told me, because if he’d written it sooner, he would have missed a lot of the story.

I think he’s right. And I think he’s also right that the story isn’t really about what happened to him. It’s about what he did with what happened to him.

Near the end of our conversation, Jay and I talked about why God put him in a position to absorb so much pain. I mentioned the book of Job to him. He nodded. You keep getting knocked down, and you keep getting back up, and at some point, that becomes its own kind of testimony.

He said that God “won’t give me anything more than I can bear” and knows that Jay is going to be “stubborn or mad as hell” but will move through it.

Jay Setchell is living testimony. I feel honored to have had him on Lens of Hopefulness with John Passadino, and I honestly could have talked to him for hours. (We did — I had to edit the episode down to an hour. Maybe someday I’ll release the bootleg.)

If Jay’s story speaks to you, pick up The Strength Within You on Amazon, and visit him at neverquittrying.com. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Lens of Hopefulness with John Passadino wherever you get your podcasts. It helps more than you know.

Remember, “It’s always too soon to quit.”

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