Um... so when had 33 been considered "late in life"?
As to your question, it all depends on your goal. Do you want to eventually be a song writer? A studio musician? Just a dude in a band? Just the dude at the party who gets drunk and tries to get everybody involved?

It all depends, man.

I want to write songs like this









I want to rock like this






The good new is that you don't need to be "great" at guitar to write and play songs like that. You can absolutely catch up to his guitar level in no time. It's the songwriting skills that you need to excel at to write decent songs. Take it from me: I've been writing songs all my like with decent success and I'm only mediocre at guitar (at best). You can totally pull that off.