September 13, 2026

How I taught myself to play the guitar in 6 months (and the formula that allows you to achieve anything)

I know there's a goal in that brain of yours that you've wanted to achieve but you haven't quite been able to yet. I'm about to give you a powerful tool that will make this easy.

Firstly, think of your goal. Is it money related? A fitness goal? Maybe you want to actively put more time and effort into some of your friendships? Whatever it is, the first step is identifying it.

Now that we have our goal, we need to break it down. To simplify this, I'm going to use one of my own goals: Learn how to play the guitar.

6 months ago I decided to pick up the guitar. It was something I always wanted to learn but for whatever reason, never did. My mum had an electric guitar sitting around and so I picked it up and started playing around. But what good is playing around if we don't know what we want to achieve? So I broke the goal down.

That was exactly how I started 6 months ago, barely being able to get into a simple chord shape let alone transitioning between multiple. The guitar is an interesting one to learn because both hands are doing something completely different. It's like rubbing your stomach while tapping your head, it's hard to do.

For the first 2-3 weeks I struggled. My brain hurt and there were even days that I picked up the guitar and within 5 minutes, I put it back down because my brain genuinely hurt. But something funny happens once you get over that hurdle. I woke up one morning and could play Riptide (by Vance Joy).

Goal achieved, I learnt how to play the guitar. But a goal shouldn't just stop there, it should progress. It should level up. I got lucky, a mate of mine leant me one of his acoustic guitars and with that, I set another goal:

Three months into playing the guitar and all of a sudden I could play 10 songs. Riptide, Something in the Orange, Hallucinogenics, Hey Soul Sister - just to name a few. A goal that for YEARS I have wanted to achieve took 3 months and some knowledge on how to set a goal and break it down, as well as patience and delayed gratification.

Now, I'm writing this 6 months into learning and I can comfortably say that I can play 50+ songs. I'm still not perfect, I still make mistakes, I still lose the strumming pattern occasionally mid song and there's certain songs that my brain can't sing to while I'm playing. But if I've come this far in just 6 months, imagine what I'll be like 6 months from now. That's the key, knowing that your goal won't happen overnight, it'll take time and consistency.

Bringing it back to habiter.

The exact model I used to teach myself how to play the guitar is built into the 'Habiter.' app. You set a goal, the app breaks it down into a daily actionable task and once you complete the goal, it tells you how you could level up and sets you a harder goal. I used the app while learning the guitar and I still have levelled up goals waiting for me to achieve.

Habiter. isn't just another habit tracking app. It's the habit tracking app that will unlock the ability inside you to set and achieve anything. One small, daily actionable task at a time.

— Chris