57yo here who started guitar from scratch 16 months ago, with zero musical background. For my fellow players, I'm at the stage where barre chords are playable but switching between them quickly is still tough.

I studied exclusively with an app (Yousician) for the first 13 months, then got a local teacher I see once a week. I practice 45-60 minutes a day and have only missed a few days in the last 16 months.

In my experience, it all comes down to practice. There is no magic forumula or shortcut. The 2000 hours to passable playing is very much accurate. I track that chart nearly perfectly.

It's very much a sprint-plateau experience. This week I was trying to learn the chords in Clapton's "Old Love" and for 6 days I could not switch between them, then on the 7th day I was able to make the leap. There's a bunch of brain science about consolidating memories and such but...it all comes down to practice.

I agree with the sentiment that you have to practice correctly, but even if you learn bad habits, more practice and challenging yourself will weed them out. It's really crucial to always challenge yourself. Practice is doing hard things, not playing things you already know. You have to separate practice from playing, because they're two different things. Yes, there's a value in picking up the guitar and fooling around, but to really get better, you have to challenge yourself constantly.

Guitar is a game of millimeters, to an extent I never appreciated. This is where a local teacher can be hugely helpful. How you position your hand, where your thumb is, the arch in different knuckles, how much you're pressing down, how you are positioning that barring finger, where your right hand is, etc. - it's all extreme fine-tuning.

It's massively rewarding. But the learning curve is brutal. I practice for an hour at mid-day and would never have imagined the incredible health benefits in terms of stress relief. It's an hour (to borrow a Steely Dan quote, albeit not in its original drug context) "time out of mind" where I'm doing something completely orthogonal to the rest of my life, for no reason except to hone a skill and enjoy.

I HIGHLY recommend keeping a journal and noting every day what you did. Day by day you'll think "I'm not improving at all, I suck, maybe I'm getting worse"...then you look and realize how much progress you've made compared to two months ago, etc.

BTW, my daughter, 16, practices half as much as I do or less, yet learns 2-3x as fast because she has a long younger brain.