I have a friend who is learning to play guitar. We'll call him Joe for the sake of anonymity. Joe has been trying to learn guitar for a about a year or so now and to be honest he is really terrible at it. Even the most basic of songs are pushing Joe's limit. I've tried to help him, but he is sure that he knows the best way to learn guitar, meanwhile his friends and family and those who have to listen to him scrape out really bad Bob Dylan songs know the truth of it. Let me explain what Joe is doing so you can avoid becoming like him.
Every day when Joe gets off work he comes home and "practices." He changes out of his work clothes and then picks up his guitar and beats out a horrible rendition of whatever song he is trying to learn. He just bought an amp too so now he cranks up the distortion and makes incomprehensible noise for about an hour or so, to chagrin of his wife.
The first mistake he made here was not warming up. It seems pretty basic and common sense, but most bad guitarists don't warm up. It's something they all have in common I've found. If Joe had spent just two to five minutes stretching out his fingers and running through some basic four finger exercises he would have a much easier time making those changes he keeps missing.
After a few bad renditions of songs he doesn't really know he will typically feel his practice is complete and move on to something else. This is another problem. He picked up the guitar, did not warm up and then did not practice any of the most basic skills necessary to play the guitar well. If Joe would take ten to fifteen minutes every session and dedicate it to practicing some fundamentals, like basic scale patterns and perhaps the chord progressions he keeps screwing up, he would see his progress improve dramatically. But Joe knows the best way to learn guitar...just ask him.
The final mistake he made is never learning to play by ear. Now I can understand why he did not, and instead just got a bunch of poor tabs off the internet and tried banging out songs immediately. Learning to play by ear is incredibly difficult. It is also the number one skill that needs to be developed by all musicians, regardless of instrument. If he had taken the time to practice singing lines and common melodies (i.e. Mary Had A Little Lamb) and then picking them out, he would have become aware of the mistakes he is making in his songs and would be able to correct them
So in short, don't be like Joe. Warm up every day, practice the fundamentals, and learn to pick out melodies. If you really want to take your playing to the next level, I would suggest following a program that incorporates all those things discussed here. My favorite is Jamorama, which is a comprehensive and interactive guitar course, which really does represent the best way to learn guitar
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