Ed Gavagan Remembers

_{Sign up to receive Surface Area or follow me on Linkedin or Twitter. Book a meeting here to talk about ghostwriting from my agency, Principals Media}.

Three Latin Kings gang members tried to stab Ed Gavagan to death as part of an initiation rite in 1995. It turned out to be the beginning, not the end of his story.

Gavagan was taken to the ER where doctors gave him a 3% chance of survival. He had suffered six stab wounds and required 35 units of blood. Doctors said it was a miracle he survived.

Just over a decade later, Gavagan found himself at a Moth event, which, if you’re not familiar with it, is like a TED Talk in which people tell true life stories live on stage.

Ed mustered the courage to get up in front of the crowd. He told his story with insight and humility and humor. The talk, later recorded and given the title “Whatever Doesn’t Kill Me,” went viral. It has since been voted the greatest Moth talk ever delivered.

I heard the story for the first time last night at a new one-man show Ed has in the West Village.

The performance, called Loud Memory, is a 90-minute Spalding Gray-style monologue in which he narrates some of the highs and lows of his life before and after the attack.

What makes the show so extraordinary is that Ed’s highs and lows tend to be so much higher and so much lower than what the rest of us experience.

Without giving away too much, I’ll say Ed has a penchant for meeting extraordinary people from Malcolm Forbes and Elizabeth Taylor to mafia members. Also, tragedy seems to stalk him and those around him.

One of the central themes is how life can be so good and unravel so quickly only to lead you to another blessing. Within a short time after the attack, Ed lost his health, job and home. But he also got close to the woman he later married.

When I got home after the show I watched the original Moth recording on YouTube. What struck me was that even though Ed tells the same story, with almost the same words, it feels totally different.

The energy and humor of his 2007 video strike chords of redemption and forgiveness. And that’s still there, but it’s been buried beneath two decades of other experiences, many also tragic. It feels sadder but wiser. Like he’s resigned to loss, but also more appreciative of life.

We all prepare and strive, but life happens to us just the same. We cope the best we can.

After the show I took a photo of Ed being congratulated by friends, including my friend David Tyree, who took a selfie.

It was a reminder that whatever stories we tell about the past, we live here in the present.

I highly recommend the show. See details here.

BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

2025 OUTLOOK: There is a wide range of outlooks for Wall Street in 2025.

GRINDING: It’s not how I of him now, but evidently Bill Gates was grinding in the 1990s.

TREASURE: Finding treasure in trash.

LA FIRES: The LA real estate transformation has already begun.

WEALTH & PROSPERITY: We all probably underestimate how much everything has improved.