- A TikTok user has gone viral for her method of making New Year’s resolutions: playing them.
- Erin Jones (who goes by the username @ErinLJones95 on the platform) explains that her solution is sort of a mix between a fun game and a manifestation — and it’s already worked for her
- “The bingo goal method is a lesson in grit and confidence no matter how lofty, delusional, terrifying or impossible your dreams may sound,” Jones tells PEOPLE.
A social media user has gone viral after sharing her innovative approach to making New Year’s resolutions this year: turning them into a game.
TikTok user Erin Jones (who goes by the username @ErinLJones95 on the platform) shares in a video that she started making discernment bingo cards back in 2023. In 2025, the method is still paying off.
“I’m turning my New Year’s resolutions into a bingo card,” Jones said in the video, which has continued to resurface a year later and has so far been viewed about 350,000 times. “And now that this is a game, I’m going to win. Okay? I’m going to get more bingo.”
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Jones tells PEOPLE that she first came up with the idea of bingo as a way to make decisions more fun — and competitive. “Since I’ve always had trouble with standard methods of achieving goals, like tracking habits, I decided to tap into my competitive spirit and gamify my goals,” she says.
“As a former teacher on maternity leave, I knew that turning a complex lesson into a game or challenge always inspired my students to work harder to achieve their goals, and the same goes for adults,” she adds. “When you can make an obstacle fun, it’s less scary and you’re excited to put in the work and achieve it.”
The key to getting a bang for your buck while making sure to include ambitious goals, says Jones, is to include a mix of hard-to-achieve solutions with more accessible ones.
“Implement ‘core goals’ and ‘stretch goals,'” she says. “A core goal is a goal that you have the least doubt you’ll accomplish this year. A stretch goal is a goal that takes you out of your comfort zone and usually represents the theme you’re trying to embody.”
Erin’s bingo card.
Erin Jones/@ErinLJones95
Jones says that because he knows he’ll cross a few items off his scorecard each year, he always adds some “delusional” goals into the mix.
“I like to have huge ‘dream come true’ goals like ‘Find a literary agent,’ ‘Act in a movie,’ ‘Produce a script for my romcom,’ and ‘Get a book job,'” she says. “Having these goals there, I’m chipping away at them little by little, even if I don’t cross them all off.”
She continues, “The bingo goal method is a lesson in boldness and self-confidence no matter how lofty, delusional, terrifying or impossible your dreams may sound.”
Jones adds that she herself has already been rewarded for bravely setting her own goals.
“I said I wanted to go to Greece in the bingo card video (which was a delusion at the time, since I didn’t have the money for an international vacation), but Delta Airlines saw my video and gave me two free return tickets to Greece,” she says. “I was convinced that this kind of thing only happened to girls with millions of followers and that it would never happen to me, but when it happened once, it changed my whole outlook and made me believe that I can have the life of my dreams. Anything is possible if you expose yourself there.”
When he creates his own bingo card each year, Jones asks himself, “What hobbies do I want to try? What do I want to experience? What do I want to see? What would I do if I knew no one would laugh at me?” she shares.
Among the goals she crossed in previous years? Go to a concert (she went on Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour), vacation in the US (she went on three trips), try eight new restaurants and go dancing.
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Erin Jones.
Erin Jones/@ErinLJones95
“A good mix ensures that your year is balanced and you don’t burn yourself out trying to achieve goals that could take years to achieve. The mix also makes it easier to win bingo,” she says.
This year, in a new video, he says he wants to make two separate cards: one with nine squares and the other with 25 squares.
“Because,” she explains, “I have a lot of career goals and fitness goals and financial goals—but I also have a lot of silly, silly, side goals. And I feel like that’s going to take up too much of the card. So why not have two?”
Those big goals, she explains in the video, include things like writing screenplays. And “side quests” are things like going ice skating for the first time ever and traveling to Italy and Barcelona.
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Jones says she encourages others who create resolution bingo cards to reward themselves with each goal achieved, even if it’s a small one.
“I want to encourage people to still be proud of themselves even if they didn’t win bingo. That’s why I encourage people to reward themselves after completing each field, not just when they hit bingo,” she says. “It increases motivation and inspires you to tackle the next goal now that you’ve proven to yourself that you can set a goal and achieve it.”
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education