# Fun facts about me, and how to write your own Source: https://decka.dev/ideas/fun-facts-about-me Fun facts about me examples by type, from hidden skills to near misses, how to write fun facts to share about yourself, and a game where the room guesses whose. A fun fact about yourself is one true sentence that nobody would guess from looking at you. I can peel an orange in one piece. I was an extra in a film, and you can see my elbow for two seconds. I have never seen snow. The best ones are small, specific and a little ridiculous, and none of them is a boast. The question turns up everywhere: the first day of a job, a new class, a team call, an interview. Most people dread it, and they have a point. Our own [get to know you guide](/ideas/get-to-know-you-questions) argues that "tell us a fun fact about yourself" demands a performance, because someone who has not prepared one has to admit it out loud. This page fixes both halves. Below are 165 examples, sorted by type, to borrow or adapt, and a way to write your own. After them comes a version of the question with the spotlight taken off: everyone writes a fact in secret, the facts come up one at a time, and the room guesses whose. ## How to write a fun fact to share about yourself A good fun fact passes five tests. **It is true.** Made-up facts belong in [two truths and a lie](/ideas/two-truths-and-a-lie), where lying is the game. **It has a detail.** "I like cooking" is a hobby. "I have made the same lasagne every Sunday for six years" is a fact. A number, a place or a name turns one into the other. **It surprises without showing off.** The room should smile, not clap. "I once got stuck in a lift with a man dressed as a penguin" beats "I have run six marathons". Everyone can picture the first, and nobody can follow the second. **It is small enough to say at work.** A fact, not a confession. Leave out health, money, family trouble, politics and religion, and anything you would not want repeated at your leaving party. **It fits in one sentence.** If it needs a story, save the story for when somebody asks. Small is not the same as timid. Collins and Miller pooled the research on self-disclosure and liking, and concluded that [in first encounters, higher disclosure leads to increased liking](https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/collins/nancy/UCSB_Close_Relationships_Lab/Publications_files/Collins%20and%20Miller,%201994.pdf). The same review found the link running the other way in field studies, where a stranger shared something personal in a public place. There it came out as a [significant negative association](https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/collins/nancy/UCSB_Close_Relationships_Lab/Publications_files/Collins%20and%20Miller,%201994.pdf). A fun fact sits between the two: it tells the room something real about you, and it is light enough to say to people you met this morning. ## Surprising skills and hidden talents Ask yourself what you can do that nobody would guess from your job. It does not have to be impressive. It has to be specific. - I can peel an orange in one piece. - I can solve a Rubik's cube, but only when nobody is watching. - I can whistle with my fingers loud enough to stop a taxi. - I can fold a fitted sheet properly, and I will teach anyone who asks. - I can juggle three oranges, but not four. - I can do a perfect impression of a dial-up modem. - I can wiggle my ears, one at a time. - I can draw a near-perfect circle freehand. - I can tie a cherry stem in a knot with my tongue. - I can guess the time to within five minutes without a clock. - I can recite a whole children's book from memory. - I can sleep anywhere, including standing up on a train. - I can name most garden birds by their song. - I can still do a cartwheel. - I can read upside down almost as fast as the right way up. - I can make one balloon animal, and it is a dog. - I can play exactly one song on the piano, and I play it on every piano I see. - I can write my name backwards with my other hand. - I can tell you the day of the week for any date this year. - I can knit, and every scarf I own came off my needles. ## Near misses and almost famous Something nearly happened to you, and you have been telling the story ever since. Near misses are the easiest facts to tell well, because they come with a twist built in. - I was an extra in a film, and you can see my elbow for two seconds. - I once sat next to a famous actor on a train and did not recognise them until they got off. - I nearly became a dentist. - I was one number away from winning a car in a raffle. - I auditioned for a band that went on to have a hit, without me. - I missed being born on a leap day by twenty minutes. - My parents nearly named me Gertrude. - I got lost on a school trip and was found in the gift shop. - I nearly moved to Iceland for a job. - I once bought the last ticket to a sold-out concert by accident. - I was in the background of a news report about a giant pumpkin. - I once came second in a pie-eating contest. - I was nearly on a game show, but my train was cancelled. - I once missed a flight and caught a later one with an entire football team. - I appeared on a breakfast television programme for nine seconds, holding a goat. ## Firsts, onlys and nevers The first time you did something, the only time anyone you know has done it, or the thing everybody has done except you. A "never" fact takes no courage at all, and it always gets a reaction. - I have never seen snow. - I have never broken a bone. - I have never seen a single Star Wars film. - I have never had a cup of coffee. - I have never been on a plane. - I was born in the back of a taxi. - My first job was dressing up as a giant carrot outside a supermarket. - I learned to swim at thirty. - I rode a horse before I rode a bike. - I am the only left-hander in my family. - I have stood somewhere the sun did not set all night. - I got my first passport at forty. - The first concert I ever went to was a brass band in a park. - I share a birthday with my grandmother. - I have only ever owned one car, and it is older than some of my colleagues. ## Food fun facts Food facts are the easiest to share and the easiest to believe. Everyone in the room eats, so everyone has a reaction. - I have eaten the same breakfast every day for six years. - I put salt on watermelon. - I do not like chocolate. - I eat the crusts of my sandwich first. - I make my own hot sauce and give it to people who did not ask. - I have tried every flavour in my local ice cream shop. - My signature dish is beans on toast, and I am proud of it. - I once entered a chilli-eating contest and lasted one chilli. - I grow tomatoes and give every plant a name. - I have a recipe that has been in my family for four generations. - I can tell which bakery a loaf came from by taste. - I have never eaten a pineapple. - I dip chips in my milkshake. - I learned to cook from the back of cereal boxes. - I have eaten breakfast for dinner every Friday for a year. ## Travel and place fun facts Places make good facts because they come with a picture. Keep them about the moment rather than the mileage, so they read as a story and not a list of stamps. - I once took the wrong train and ended up in another country. - I have been to the same campsite every summer since I was born. - I grew up on an island with one road. - I once spent a night in an airport and loved it. - I have been stopped at customs for carrying a cheese. - I can say thank you in nine languages. - I once got lost in a furniture shop for an hour. - I have never left the country I was born in. - I have swum in a lake that was warmer than the air. - The furthest I have been from home is an airport hotel. - I have visited a town that shares my surname. - I once went on holiday to the wrong city with the same name. - I have seen the northern lights from a car park. - I have climbed the highest hill in my county in flip-flops. - I once missed my stop and rode the night bus to the end of the line. ## Childhood fun facts The safest facts of all, because they are about somebody who no longer exists. Everyone was a strange child. - I won a colouring competition when I was six, and I still have the certificate. - I had an imaginary friend called Kevin. - I once wrote to a television show and got a reply. - I played a tree in three school plays in a row. - I believed until I was ten that brown cows made chocolate milk. - I ran away from home once, as far as the end of the garden. - I had a pet snail called Speedy. - I learned to ride a bike at twelve. - I was scared of the moon until I was seven. - My first word was "biscuit". - I made the local paper for growing a giant sunflower. - I used to think thunder was the sky moving its furniture. - I sold painted rocks to my neighbours, and made enough for a comic. - I was convinced I would grow up to be a dolphin. - I was the fastest crawler at my nursery and I have the photograph to prove it. ## Fun facts with a number in them A number is the quickest way to make a fact specific. It also makes the fact sound true, which matters when the room is guessing. - I have moved house eleven times. - I have read the same book fourteen times. - I have kept the same houseplant alive for twelve years. - I have walked to work every day for three years. - I am one of five children. - I have watched my favourite film more than fifty times. - I own forty mugs, and I use two. - I have had the same phone number since I was fourteen. - I know the first hundred digits of pi. - I once ran a 10k in a dinosaur costume. - I have been to nine weddings in one summer. - I have been to the same hairdresser for twenty years. ## Collections and odd habits A collection is a fact with an inventory. An odd habit is a fact that happens every day. - I collect snow globes from places I have never been. - I keep a jar of coins from every country I have visited. - I keep every ticket stub from every film I have seen. - I name my houseplants after cheeses. - I alphabetise my spice rack. - I iron my socks. - I own more board games than plates. - I collect rubber ducks, and there are ninety-two of them. - I write a review of every meal I eat out, for nobody. - I have kept a diary every day since I was twelve. - I take a photograph of every dog I meet. - I send myself a postcard from every trip. ## Fun facts about me for work A work fun fact has one extra test: you would be happy to hear it read out at your leaving party. Every example above passes it. These are written for an introduction at work, and some say a little about how you work. - I have never been late for a train. - My first job was selling ice cream at a football ground. - I can type as fast as I talk. - I trained as a chef before I ever worked in an office. - I make a playlist for every project. - I have the tidiest desk drawer in the building. - I once taught a computer class to a room of grandparents. - I have read every page of my car's manual. - My out-of-office reply has a joke in it. - I once took a work call from the queue for a roller coaster. - I keep a list of every book I have read since school. - I have used the same notebook brand for ten years. - I answer every email in the order it arrived, no exceptions. - I have learned a word of every language spoken on my team. **For an interview, pick one that shows how you work.** "I have kept the same houseplant alive for twelve years" says patience. "I rebuilt a bike from parts" says you finish things. Say it, then stop talking. ## How to run fun facts as an icebreaker at work **Ask for one sentence.** A fact is short and a story is a speech. Saying "one sentence" out loud tells the room how small to go. **Warn people the day before.** Put the prompt in the meeting invite. Nobody produces a good fact cold, and the people who need time to think are the ones who dread the question most. **Go first, and go small.** The first answer sets the size of every answer after it. "I put salt on watermelon" invites more facts. "I have visited every continent" ends the round. **Offer a category, not a blank.** "Something you can cook" or "a place you have lived" is easier than "a fun fact", and everybody has an answer to it. **Do not go round the table.** A round puts each person on the spot in turn, with everybody watching. Collect the facts first and read them out, as the game further down does, and the round costs nobody anything. **On a video call, use the chat.** Ask everybody to type a fact and send it on a count of three, so nobody reads anyone else's before writing their own. ## Fun facts for school and students For a new class, the best facts are about life outside school. These work for students of any age, and teachers can use the same shapes. - I have a pet tortoise who is older than me. - I know the names of all eight planets in three languages. - I have read every book in a series twice. - I have built a computer. - I learned to skateboard last summer. - My middle name is the name of a cheese. - I have a twin, and we have different birthdays. - I have milked a cow. - I am learning my third language. - I baked a cake for every birthday in my family this year. - I can say the whole alphabet in sign language. - I once found a fossil on the beach. **For teachers:** the fact a class remembers is the one that makes you human. "I failed my driving test four times" lands better than any qualification. ## Fun facts for kids Younger children find it easier to finish a sentence than to invent a fact, so give them the start: "I can...", "I have...", "My favourite...". These are the kind of answers that come back. - I can hop on one foot for a whole minute. - My cat sleeps in the laundry basket. - I have a wobbly tooth right now. - I can count to twenty in French. - I once found a frog in my welly. - My favourite food is pasta with no sauce. - I have a collection of shiny stones. - I can draw a dragon. - I learned to ride my bike without stabilisers this year. - I can do a handstand against the wall. - My dog knows how to shake hands. - I have been on a boat. ## Interesting facts about me, and how they differ from fun facts The two get asked as if they were one question. A fun fact is a small surprise. An interesting fact says something about who you are: why you chose your work, what you changed your mind about, how you spend a Saturday. Use a fun fact for a team meeting, a new class or a party. Use an interesting one for an interview or the "about" section of a profile, and keep the fun fact for the follow-up question. - I changed careers at thirty-five, from accountancy to teaching. - I learned to code because I wanted to build a website for my band. - I volunteer at a library every Saturday morning. - I read one book from a different country every month. - I started running at forty, and now I run every morning. - I taught myself three instruments from videos. - I spent a year living on a narrowboat. - I have kept every letter anyone has ever sent me. ## What to say when you hate the fun fact question Most people hate it because of the spotlight rather than the fact. Everyone has a fun fact. Nobody enjoys producing one on cue, with the room waiting. **Pick a "never".** "I have never seen a single Star Wars film" is true of plenty of people, takes no courage and always gets a reaction. It is still a small performance, but it is the smallest one on offer. **Pick from a category, not from your whole life.** Food, places, firsts. A smaller pond is quicker to fish. **Keep one ready.** Write it in your phone's notes and use it for a year. Nobody will remember that you used it last time. **Do not pass out loud.** John, Barasz and Norton ran [seven experiments](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4743808/) on people who hold information back. Their summary is that [declining a request to disclose](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4743808/) often makes a worse impression even than divulging unsavory personal information. Their participants were judging strangers on paper, such as dating profiles and job applications, not colleagues in a meeting. Take the direction rather than the size. A flat answer beats a pass. **Better still, change the format.** The spoken round is the problem, and the guide that calls the question a performance is right about it. Put the facts on cards instead. Nobody stands up, nobody performs, and the room does the work of guessing whose each one is. ## The guess whose fun fact game The same question, with the spotlight taken off. Everyone's fact goes in front of the room at once, with no name on it. 1. **Everyone writes one true fact about themselves** on a slip of paper, in capitals, and folds it twice. 2. **The slips go into a bowl.** One person draws them and reads each one out. 3. **Everyone points at once.** On three, every player points at the person they think it belongs to. The owner points too, at somebody else, so their hand gives nothing away. 4. **The owner owns up** and tells the story behind it, in a minute or less. 5. **Score it.** Two points for pointing at the owner, and one point to the owner for every person who pointed somewhere else. The facts that score best are the ones that sound like somebody else. A quiet accountant who once came second in a pie-eating contest fools the whole room. It is the gentler cousin of two truths and a lie. That game puts one person in front of the room at a time and asks it to find their lie. This one puts everybody's fact up together, so nobody is alone at the front for a second. Ten people make a good game. In a bigger room, read a dozen facts and save the rest for the next meeting. ## Playing whose fun fact live, on everyone's phones On phones, the game runs in a Decka room, with every fact on the big screen. The room is called [Who Said It?](/activities/who-said-it-game) Its door for fun facts is "Whose fun fact?". Players join from their own phones with a code, with no app and no account. The host runs it from the big screen or from their own phone, and the game needs three players to start, with five or more better. A practice card comes first: a fact nobody in the room wrote. Everyone votes on it and nobody scores, so the room learns the phone before anything counts. Then the prompt goes up, such as "A fun fact about you that nobody here knows", and every phone writes one fact. For a new team the prompt can be "Something about you your coworkers would never guess". A two-round game can follow with "Something you did as a kid that nobody here knows". The phone tells each writer: "Nobody will know it's yours until the reveal. When your card comes up, vote like everyone else." While people write, the big screen shows only how many facts are in and how many people are done. The facts come up one at a time, in a shuffled order that is never the order they were written. Each phone shows the fact and lists everyone in the round except its owner. Everyone is on that list whether or not they wrote, so nobody learns who skipped the question. That answers the pass problem above: in this room, not writing is invisible. The owner votes too, and their phone looks exactly like everybody else's. Their vote counts in the tally of who has voted, and never in the score. At the reveal, the owner's name goes up with the fact, along with how many people named each person and how many were fooled. The host moves on with "Next card" once the owner has told the story. Naming the owner scores 100 points, and the owner scores 50 for every person they fooled. Points can be turned off for a first meeting, and the reveal still shows who got it right. | Setting | Default | Range | | --- | --- | --- | | Prompts | from the template | 1 to 5, one round each | | Facts per person | 1 | 1 or 2 | | Writing time | 90 seconds | 30 to 300 seconds | | Guessing time | 20 seconds | 10 to 60 seconds | | Practice card | On | On or off | | Scoring | Points | Points or off | | Cards played per round | 20 | 10, 15, 20, 30 or all | Once writing closes, the host's phone lists the facts still to come, text only, and any of them can be hidden before it goes up. A fact already on screen can be skipped. A hidden or skipped fact's owner is never named, on any screen or in any report. The host's report shows each played fact, whose it was and how the room voted, counted per name. It never shows who voted for whom. Each player's own report keeps their fact and how many people guessed them. ## Frequently asked questions ### What is a good fun fact about yourself? One true sentence with a detail in it that nobody would guess from looking at you. I can peel an orange in one piece. I have never seen snow. I was an extra in a film, and you can see my elbow for two seconds. The best ones are small and a little ridiculous, never a boast. ### What are some examples of fun facts about me? I can juggle three oranges, but not four. I once got lost in a furniture shop for an hour. I had an imaginary friend called Kevin. I put salt on watermelon. I collect rubber ducks. Sort your own life by type, such as skills, near misses, firsts, food and places, and one usually jumps out. ### What are good fun facts about me for work? Ones you would be happy to hear read out at your leaving party. My first job was selling ice cream at a football ground. I make a playlist for every project. My out-of-office reply has a joke in it. Leave out health, money, family trouble, politics and religion. ### What should I say when someone asks for a fun fact about me? A never fact is the easiest answer: something everybody else has done and you have not, such as never having seen snow or a famous film. It takes no courage and always gets a reaction. Keep one ready in your phone's notes, and use it for a year. ### What is the difference between a fun fact and an interesting fact about yourself? A fun fact is a small surprise, such as being able to wiggle your ears. An interesting fact says something about who you are, such as why you changed careers. Use a fun fact for a meeting or a class, and an interesting one for an interview or a profile. ### What are fun facts to share about yourself in class? Facts about life outside school work best. I have a pet tortoise who is older than me. I learned to skateboard last summer. My middle name is the name of a cheese. For younger children, give them the start of a sentence, such as I can or I have, and let them finish it. ### What if I do not have a fun fact? Everyone has one, and the trouble is finding it on cue. Pick a category instead of searching your whole life: food, places, firsts, or something you have never done. If you get to choose the format, put the facts on anonymous cards, so nobody has to perform and nobody can tell who passed. ### How do you turn fun facts into a game? Everyone writes one true fact in secret, the facts are read out one at a time, and the room points at whoever they think each one belongs to. The owner points too, at somebody else, so nothing gives them away. Score two points for a right guess and one to the owner for every person fooled. ### Can you play guess whose fun fact online? Yes. Decka's room called Who Said It? runs it on phones, with a shared big screen. Everyone writes a fact on their phone, the facts come up one at a time in a shuffled order, and every phone votes on whose it is. It works on a video call as well as in one room. ## Activities - [Who Said It?](https://decka.dev/activities/who-said-it-game.md): Everyone writes one, the room guesses whose [Whose fun fact? for a new team](https://decka.dev/templates/whose-fun-fact-for-a-new-team-6e4029db5408.md) [Whose fun fact? in class](https://decka.dev/templates/whose-fun-fact-in-class-8ed56c49681e.md) [Fun facts: two rounds](https://decka.dev/templates/fun-facts-two-rounds-843a914f9441.md)