The Game of Life and How to Play It and The Secret Door to Success
Florence Scovel Shinn, with an Introduction by Tom Butler-Bowdon
Capstone/A Wiley Brand (XXXX 2020)

“The game of life is about giving and receiving,” for better or worse.

That is one of Florence Scovel Shinn’s key concepts, a variation on the proverb of sowing and reaping. Live a life of negativity and you will starve to death, at least spiritually. Live a life that is positive and you will thrive. What you give toi others is what you will get from them.

Two of her works are combined in this volume, one of the latest in the Capstone Classics series: The Game of Life and How to Play It (1925) and The Secret Door to Success (1940). She is not among the most famous of authors of self-help books (e.g. Dale Carnegie, Stephen Covey, Norman Vincent Peale, Tony Robbins, Eckhart Tolle, and Zig Ziglar) but her influence is much greater than I realized.

Self-help presupposes that (a) someone has potentialities that can be fulfilled or at least developed with assistance and (b) most people are both willing and able to apply that advice to achieve improvement. Scovel Shinn helped immigrants in the 1920s such as my maternal grandparents from Sweden, strangers in a strange land, who needed advice about how to pursue opportunities they associated with the American Dream.  She also appealed to those who struggled through the Great Depression in the 1930s.

She  convinced them they could help themselves if they believed in themselves and if they believed in “a universal intelligence, or God, or the power within them (call it whatever you like, but it must be beyond the normal conscious mind) that can help almost anyone achieve almost anything, or at least what they may now insist is impossible.

Who was Scovel Shinn? Briefly, she was was an American artist and book illustrator who became a New Thought spiritual teacher and metaphysical writer in her middle years. In New Thought circles, she is best known for her first book, The Game of Life and How to Play It (1925). Scovel Shinn expressed her philosophy this way: “The invisible forces are ever working for man who is always ‘pulling the strings’ himself, though he does not know it. Owing to the vibratory power of words, whatever man voices, he begins to attract.”

“The object of the game of life is to see clearly one’s good and obliterate all mental pictures of evil”…The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy…Most people consider life a battle, but it is not a battle, it is a game…Man must prepare for the thing he has asked for, when there isn’t the slightest sign of it in sight.”

According to Butler-Bowdon, many of Scovel Shinn’s ideas came from her involvement in the religious organization known as Unity. Today, “it describes itself as ‘A worldwide Spiritual Movement dedicated to helping people discover and express their divine potential’. Although its teachings are mainly drawn from the Old and New Testaments, it holds that spiritual truth is too vast to be contained by any one religion or philosophy. It’s a very practical, non-dogmatic form of Christianity whose focus is the application of universal moral law or ‘infinite intelligence’ to everyday life situations. What also sets it apart from mainstream Christian churches is the leading role that women have played in the organization.” Florence Scovel Shinn is an excellent case in point.

Capstone/Wiley and Tom Butler-Bowdon are to be commended for the production quality of the volumes in the Capstone Classics series. They are among the most influential works throughout the history of world literature. It should also be noted that the volumes are priced so that almost anyone can build their own personal library. For example, Amazon US will sell a copy of The Game of Life and How to Play It and The Secret Door to Success for only $13.00. That’s great value.