Notes from Pew study on how demographics are changing world religion

Expect to see more writing on religion and spirituality here. While crypto investment is still my current obsession, I’ve shifted that content over to Breaking Bitcoin and an email newsletter.

There is tremendous wisdom and value stored in the world’s major faiths. Huston Smiths calls them the great wisdom traditions and he’s not wrong. For me this interest snowballed with Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists book [Amazon]. Fwiw I don’t consider myself an atheist. Here are some of my blog posts about his book.

I hope in the future to join or launch a lifelong project to identify, collect, and share all of the world’s religious wisdom with all of the world’s people. And the best sort of wisdom is when you are not just reading but doing. Not only reading but practicing. I call this loosely the soul habit and have written briefly about it before. Let me know if this interests you.

The Pew Research Center regularly publishes valuable survey data and analyses on how religion is practiced and how it’s changing around the world. Here are my notes from a recent study on demographics. Here is the Pew analysis and full report.

NOTES

Islam will become the most populous religion in the world because, simply put, Muslims have more babies

In the period between 2010 and 2015, births to Muslims made up an estimated 31% of all babies born around the world – far exceeding the Muslim share of people of all ages in 2015 (24%).

As a group, nonbelievers and the unaffiliated will continue to decline as a percentage of the world population. This is driven primarily by people leaving Christianity. Other groups unable to keep pace with global population growth: Buddhism, Judaism, and folk religions

…the religiously unaffiliated population is heavily concentrated in places with aging populations and low fertility, such as China, Japan, Europe and North America.

Between 2015 and 2020, religious “nones” are projected to experience a net gain of 7.6 million people due to religious switching; people who grew up as Christians are expected to make up the overwhelming majority of those who switch into the unaffiliated group

The relative influence of Muslims is expected to increase in sub-Saharan African and decrease in Asia

By 2060, 27% of the global Muslim population is projected to be living in the region, up from 16% in 2015. By contrast, the share of Muslims living in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to decline over the period from 61% to 50%.

The youngest major religions are, in order, Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity

The median ages of Muslims (24 years) and Hindus (27) are younger than the median age of the world’s overall population (30), while the median age of Christians (30) matches the global median. All the other groups are older…

China is home to 61% of the world’s unaffiliated population as of 2015 (!)

Content marketing wisdom from Jason Lemkin at SaaStr

This Jason Lemkin post is loaded with advice on how to create a successful content brand. I’ll probably add these notes to my personal bible.

NOTES

Quora is great but takes a lot of content (more than 2K answers for 1M monthly views)
The key to Quora is I did what was easy. I used Quora questions as a vehicle to stimulate a memory of some mistake I’d made, some learning I’d had. And I made a rule if I couldn’t get the answer done immediately, I’d move on.

Blog traffic is consistent and reliable but has stopped growing (3% MoM)

What didn’t work: engagement on LinkedIn and Facebook Page, YouTube audience growth despite posting high quality videos, traffic levels on Medium

Podcasting is a lot of work:
Post-production takes a lot of time, and it’s very hard to build an audience. There are so many podcasts now, and little organic way to discover new ones. So unless you can crush it with a podcast, you may find the ROI very low

In-person events conferences have dis-economies of scale, especially in an expensive and event-heavy region like the Bay
So my suggestion is don’t try to put on an industry event in the Bay Area unless you are sure you somehow can be #1 or #2. Do a customer event instead. Higher ROI, much easier to put on.

Twitter is good once you have critical mass (~40K quality followers)

Mediocre content does not perform. Contributed articles and boring sponsor posts…are read by very, very few folks.

Always experiment with new channels
I think if you want your content marketing to keep growing, you have to add new layers that perform. Our goal is one new material initiative / channel a year.

Find a publishing cadence and stick to it

Like a startup, give your strategy time (his magic number is 24 months) to develop a sustainable and growing audience

Daily Habits Checklist (February 27 – March 19): Controllable time and The Sovereign Individual

The last three weeks were very good, after almost two months of crappy scores. If you saw my earlier checklists you’ll understand the reasons for this swing: in January and February my time was spent on business projects and business travel, and in March I shifted back to working for myself.

Working for yourself is one way to maximize the amount of time in a typical day that’s under your control. Let’s call it “controllable time”. I’ve come to realize that having many hours of controllable time is almost essential if I’m to maintain the habits that I consider necessary for a good and fulfilled life. Like the habits listed above: Writing and publishing. Exercising and meditating. Socializing and exploring.

Above money, above fame, sometimes above even love and intimacy, I value having large amounts of this controllable time. A big piece of what attracts me to a writer’s lifestyle is this almost pure expression of life freedom. You can choose to spend each day, every day, exactly as you wish. Much of the time it’s wasted, but it’s wasted wilfully. It’s not perfect by any means, as each day is a kind of mental torture. As a friend elegantly put it, “you have to constantly outwit yourself to get anything done.” This might seem strange or selfish to some. For others it may feel like an indulgence or a luxury best enjoyed in small doses. For me it has slowly become a necessity. I crave it and I look forward to it, each and every day.

Current book: The Sovereign Individual. A rare book which is living up to its buzz within tech circles. Forecasts and describes a future where individuals gain increasing sovereignty at the expense of nation-states. Because technology empowers the individuals who know how to create and exploit it, and because organized violence – the state’s most effective and reliable tool – is increasingly outdated and ineffective. There was no Kindle version, but I managed to find a PDF and then convert it to mobi. If you’d like a copy, email me.

Current quote:

The best lovers do not have the best bodies. They are not the best-looking, and they do not have the largest respective body parts. What they do have is the best attitude: they are completely enthusiastic. – Lou Paget

Why do I track and share this stuff? Click here. Thanks for reading!

My Personal Bible: 2017 additions including The War of Art and The 4 Agreements

A Personal Bible is a collection of your favorite wisdom, notes, and passages that you can – like the Bible – read and re-read and absorb and memorize and integrate wholly into your life. Over the years my own collection has grown to include poems, book notes, article excerpts, and even a Bible passage. I formalized the document last year and try to update it monthly and read from it nightly. It’s one of my daily habits but not one that I actively track.

Below are additions I’ve made in 2017. You can download my latest version here. Feel free to read or edit or fork your own!

**

War of Art by Steven Pressfield [Kindle]

  • Resistance will unfailingly point to true North — meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing. We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others. Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.
  • The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.
  • The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance.
  • The conventional interpretation is that the amateur pursues his calling out of love, while the pro does it for money. Not the way I see it. In my view, the amateur does not love the game enough. If he did, he would not pursue it as a sideline, distinct from his “real” vocation.
  • The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique not because he believes technique is a substitute for inspiration but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come.
  • The ancient Spartans schooled themselves to regard the enemy, any enemy, as nameless and faceless. In other words, they believed that if they did their work, no force on earth could stand against them.
  • When Arnold Schwarzenegger hits the gym, he’s on his own turf. But what made it his own are the hours and years of sweat he put in to claim it. A territory doesn’t give, it gives back.

The 4 Agreements by Miguel Ruiz [Kindle]

  1. Be impeccable with your word
  2. Don’t take anything personally
  3. Don’t make assumptions
  4. Always do your best

Tim Ferriss [source]

  • What’s the least crowded channel?
  • What if I could only subtract to solve problems?
  • Am I hunting antelope or field mice?
  • What would this look like if it were easy?
  • One former Navy SEAL friend recently texted me a principle used in their training: “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.”

$30B Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing shares gems in this Bloomberg interview

was a refugee from China to HK during the Japan invasion

“cashflow is the most important thing”

“whatever industry I get into I buy books about that industry”

believes in a Western management model mixed with a Confucian life philosophy

wears a simple Citizen solar-powered watch and runs his watch 30 minutes fast because he can be anywhere in HK in 30 minutes (!)

named one of his two holding companies Cheung Kong after the Yantze river because many other rivers flow into it, metaphor for how he should be (welcoming and truly modest, not just superficially so)

“I’ve always believed that it is very important for people to have faith”

his life philosophy in two sentences:
1. Always be industrious
2. The virtuous welcome onerous duties

framed a share of AIG stock, explains that AIG was worth almost $200B and seemingly overnight dropped to $17B, losing 91% of its value. serves as a reminder to his two sons: manage the company carefully, “don’t invest like gambling”