New Thought Movement · 1925 to Present · Life as a Game with Spiritual Laws
The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.Florence Scovel Shinn — The Game of Life and How to Play It, 1925
Florence Scovel Shinn published The Game of Life and How to Play It in 1925, presenting life as a structured game with specific laws that, when understood and followed, produce predictable results. Her framework drew on Christian Science, New Thought, and her own experience as a professional illustrator and spiritual teacher in New York. The book was one of the first major New Thought texts written primarily for women, and it addressed the practical spiritual questions of daily life with a directness and wit that distinguished it from the more formal treatises of her male contemporaries.
Shinn's central insight is that most people play the game of life without knowing the rules — they are baffled by the seeming randomness of their results and unaware that their own thought patterns, spoken words, and emotional states are generating those results with precision. Her "game" metaphor is apt: the rules are real whether or not one knows them, and ignorance does not exempt one from consequences. The person who learns the rules — who understands how thoughts create beliefs, how beliefs create behavior, and how behavior creates results — can begin to play intentionally rather than accidentally.
Her concept of the "boomerang" — that thoughts, words, and deeds return to their source with accuracy — is the Law of Cause and Effect expressed in a memorable image. The person who sends out judgment receives judgment; the person who sends out love receives love; the person who acts from fear tends to produce the feared outcome. This is not cosmic magic but the reliable operation of behavioral patterns: the way we treat others shapes how they treat us; the things we focus on expand in our perception; the story we tell about ourselves tends to become self-fulfilling.
Shinn was unusual among New Thought writers of her era in several respects: she was a woman writing for women, she combined her spiritual philosophy with a dry sense of humor, and she drew explicitly on Christian scripture as a source of practical wisdom rather than treating it as background decoration. Her interpretations of biblical passages as practical instructions — "casting your bread upon the waters" as a principle of generous giving that returns, "behold, I make all things new" as a principle of mental renewal — gave her work a texture different from the more systematic treatises of Wattles and Haanel.
The Game of Life was self-published and distributed through word of mouth for many years before gaining wider recognition. Its eventual reach — it is now translated into dozens of languages and remains in print nearly a century after publication — reflects the resonance of its central ideas with readers who found the more academic New Thought texts less accessible. Shinn's gift was for the memorable concrete image that made abstract principles immediately graspable: the boomerang, the game, the divine plan that opens when one "stops fighting" and allows.
Her emphasis on the spoken word as a creative force — the declaration or "decree" that, made with faith, tends to become reality — connects to the research on self-talk and the practice of affirmation that runs from Coué through Hill to contemporary positive psychology. The mechanism Shinn identified is real: the words we habitually use to describe ourselves, our situations, and our possibilities shape our behavior in ways that tend to produce outcomes consistent with those descriptions.
Your word is your wand. The words you speak create your own destiny.Florence Scovel Shinn — The Game of Life and How to Play It, 1925