The Game of Life and How to Play It

Florence Scovel Shinn 1925

This self-help guide combines Bible passages, spoken affirmations, and anecdotes about faith and everyday problems. Shinn connects advice about money with the biblical idea that giving opens the way to receiving.

81 pages 1h 34m reading time

A founding book of the New Thought movement's practical self-help writing, still widely read about a century after it first appeared.
Argues that life is a game played with words and thoughts, so what a person says and expects tends to come back to them, good or bad.
Teaches that fear and worry block good things from arriving, and that trust in a higher power, shown through action, lets them in.
Helped shape modern ideas about affirmations and "manifesting," which later writers in the positive thinking and law of attraction tradition carried to a mass audience.

Published it herself

When she could not find a publisher willing to take it, Shinn paid to print the book on her own.
Stories from real clients

Many of its short tales come from people Shinn counseled and taught at her talks in New York City.
Written in her fifties

Shinn was about 54 when it appeared, after years as an artist and then as a spiritual teacher.