Happy to chime in. I tried to learn 30 years ago and didn’t make it very far. Life was crazy busy then, single father looking after 4 kids, full time job, teachers obsessed with teaching scales and it all got too hard.
Just under 10 years ago, at the age of 53, I saw a friend progress quite quickly and decided to pick it up again. I could only remember that you hold your fingers close to the fret, couldn’t remember any chords at all.
Now I’m so thrilled I stuck with it and am having a ball with it. It’s now a lifestyle. Every day the guitar gets played and being relatively newly retired it’s getting often hours of attention each day. When I started 10 years ago I had a clear goal. Learn to play songs that people will sing along to.
Justin guitar is where I learned my first song, Blowin in the wind, the A E D easy version that used to be in his first songbook. Other lessons that made a huge difference were the one about timing your practice. That way the 15 minutes of practice wasn’t actually taken up with tuning your guitar, looking for your song notes, etc, but 15 minutes of actual practice.
At the start I could only play for 5 minutes at a time because my fingers hurt so bad. So I did that 3 times a day, typically while waiting for my cup of tea to steep, good thing I like it strong.
Other important lessons were using the index finger as an anchor to move between A E and D. I typically now play the A as a barre chord with just my index but that first anchor tip made a big difference. Another one was learning fast chord changes and making sure I could do 60 chord changes from A to D in a minute, then E to D and lastly E to A.
My wife has commented many times how glad she is that I decided to get serious about the guitar. It’s introduced us to many amazing people and experiences. I’ve now done 80+ open mics.
Playing and instrument has also been a help for me in dealing with the old black dog of depression. When I have a down day, I grab the guitar, start playing and invariably feel better, sometimes quite quickly.
If you are browsing this topic because you are thinking of picking up the guitar, or looking for inspiration, don’t let the time it takes to learn a guitar hold you back. That time is going to pass regardless so pick it up and get started. Based on my experience, you won’t regret it.