Duff McKagan was 30 when his pancreas burst. Years of addiction had caught up with him, and he came very close to not making it. At the time he was the bass player in Guns N’ Roses, one of the biggest bands on the planet. None of that was any use to him in a hospital bed.
That moment sits in the middle of It’s So Easy, and it’s where the book changes gear. The first half is the story you’d expect. Punk bands in Seattle, the move to Los Angeles, then Guns N’ Roses taking over the world, with all the chaos that came with it. It’s a great music book. Slash wrote about the same years in his own book, which is really good too and tells it from a different angle. Duff’s goes somewhere else. It’s a book about addiction.
More than anything, though, it’s about recovery, hope and finding yourself. I read it in 2017, and I’ve been back to it since. By then I’d been sober for a couple of years. I made that decision at a Tony Robbins event in 2014. A story like Duff’s lands differently once you’ve made a decision like that yourself.
Rebuilding, one ordinary day at a time
What I love about the second half is how ordinary the rebuilding is. There’s no magic moment where everything clicks. Duff gets on a mountain bike. He takes up martial arts and trains hard. Later he goes back to school to study business, a rock star sitting in lectures like everybody else. Bit by bit, he builds a different life.
He doesn’t skip the ugly bits to get to the happy ending, either. You see how far down it went before he started climbing back, and that’s what makes the climb mean something. There’s a lot of hope in this book, and it’s earned.
And that’s where the line that stuck with me comes in.
“Yes, confidence was knowing I could do anything. But, I realized, confidence must always be rooted in work.”
Plenty of people think confidence is something you’re born with. You’ve either got it or you haven’t. Duff had the rock star kind, playing stadiums all over the world, and it didn’t keep him out of that hospital bed. The confidence he writes about later comes from somewhere much less exciting. Turning up, doing the work, and doing it again the next day.
I don’t believe in willpower. I said so in Done Beats Perfect, and I still mean it. Willpower can get you through a short spell, but it won’t carry you for years. What carries you is discipline, routine and rituals: the small things you do so often they stop being a decision. Duff’s book is full of them, and none of them are glamorous.
My own version is tiny by comparison. I read at least one page a day. That’s the whole rule, and it’s what got me reading again after years of not reading at all. A page a day doesn’t sound like much. Keep it going and you end up reading about a book a week, which is where I am now. It’s confidence rooted in work, just on a very small scale.
It’s the same idea behind done beats perfect, the thing I wrote a whole book about. You don’t wait until you feel ready. You start, you do the work, and the feeling of being ready turns up somewhere along the way. Nobody is a student, an athlete or a man in recovery on day one. Duff did the work until he was all three.
The other thing I took from It’s So Easy is about being yourself. Duff spent years as the bass player from Guns N’ Roses, with everything people assumed came with that. Recovery meant working out who he was underneath. He wasn’t going to be boxed in by who other people thought he should be, or by their agendas. That’s a big part of getting clean, and I reckon it’s a big part of growing up at any age.
You don’t need a stadium tour or a hospital bed for any of this to apply to you. Most of us have something we’d love to feel more confident about. Speaking, selling, starting the thing we keep putting off. Duff’s answer is to do the work first and let the confidence catch up.
It’s in the recovery chapter of my free guide, 50 Books That Shaped Me, alongside a few other honest stories like it.
And if you only know Duff as the tall bloke with the bass, you’re in for a surprise. What would you feel confident about if you’d already put the work in?
