James Hopkins, From Finance to a Nonprofit Mission in Nepal

  1. At 43 years old, you decided to leave a lucrative career in finance to move to Nepal to study Buddhism.  As you have said, “You let go of a whole persona. You disassembled and reassembled into something else”. 

What prompted you to make this massive change?

Generally speaking, people tend to try to find happiness outside of themselves. And I was no different than anyone else. I graduated from college in the 1980s when “greed was good.” When working on Wall Street was the dream job, and the goal was to work hard, get married, and have 2.3 children and a late model BMW parked in the driveway. I did most of that and I was a pretty happy guy! No complaints.

But sometime in my mid 30s, I went traveling in Asia, and after a couple of weeks I found myself sitting on the floor of a temple in a remote part of India, listening to a teaching on Buddhist philosophy by little Tibetan lama in maroon robes, and he was the happiest man I had ever seen. Among many other things, he told us that the only lasting source of happiness wasn’t outside of yourself at all, but inside. And that any other kind of happiness was destined to eventually fall apart. Somehow it all really made sense to me.    

I went back home again, but soon I was already making plans to return to India. My partner and I began traveling to India, Nepal, and Tibet every year, to learn more about Eastern philosophy, and after a few years we just decided to “step out of the system” altogether. We made a clean break – left our jobs, our families, our country, everything – and checked into a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Kathmandu, trying to cultivate that deeper sense of happiness.  

After three years of sitting on the floor and studying with the monks, I was asked to become the director of development for the monastery, and I spent the next many years traveling around the world with the same little Tibetan lama whom I had met in India so many years ago, helping to gather support for his activities. About five years ago, I re-retired to focus on a nonprofit that I had started in Kathmandu.

In a way that whole process of remaking myself boiled down to just a few things: Keeping the mind open to possibilities, listening to intuition, and letting go and taking a chance. The truth is I never would have ended up with the unusual and extraordinarily fortunate life that I currently have if I hadn’t started down a very ordinary and typical path. But a window opened, and somehow I knew enough to jump through it.

2. You’ve lived in Kathmandu since 2004. What were those first few years like? Explain how you “phased into it over the years” before it became your permanent home. It’s a good lesson in reinvention.

I think it’s very difficult to reinvent yourself. We humans aren’t any “one thing.” But we end up creating some kind of “self” and then our family, our friends, and our society all reinforce that idea. Eventually, we come to believe that we are truly that one thing. “I am an investment broker.” “I am a violinist.” “I can’t dance.” But none of that is true. I had seen two other people try to leave the high-flying investment world in the past, and both of them had failed. One of them returned and got his job back after six months, and the other one disappeared.

So, I decided to do two specific things: Firstly, I hired someone to take over my own job, and I phased myself out slowly, over the course of about three years. That way, I was able to shed my skin and re-emerge slowly with some kind of confidence. Secondly, I replaced one structure with another. After twenty years of working for one very big corporation, with its own policies and hierarchies and steps to success, I chose to join a Tibetan Buddhist monastery and I enrolled in their shedra or monastic college. This college had its own unique structure and hierarchies and steps to success as well.  

Now I wasn’t simply leaving the past behind, I was actively working towards something new. This was very helpful. Kathmandu is a crazy and chaotic city, and we had moved to a completely foreign culture. This could easily have been disorienting, however by attending school we were spending our days in structured classes, and we were taking tests and exams. More importantly, we had a ready-made community and a support system, new friends and a purpose.

 3) Quilts for Kids became your life’s purpose and passion. Tell us about it. What have you and your team accomplished. Share some of your inspiring story here.

Growing up in an ordinary town in Virginia, I had never seen street beggars before. When I moved to Kathmandu, there were always these little kids begging in the street and I really didn’t know how to handle it. I felt alternately well-intentioned, scared, angry, dismissive. One day I was taken down to the beggars’ encampment which was a place of real poverty: Families living in houses made of bamboo sticks tied together and covered with plastic. Kids without pants running around barefoot. Everyone shouting. Fires burning everywhere. I had just never seen anything like it. I started spending time in that community, every day. I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, but I had been told by my Tibet and llama that I should “go out into the street and help the first person that I saw,” so I kept returning to the camp.

After a few months of working in the begging camp, I saw a woman hand-stitching a beautiful brightly colored quilt for her daughter’s wedding dowry. Being from Virginia, where we have a quilt-making tradition, I also saw a potential product. I bought the quilt from the woman, took it back to the U.S. and sold it, then returned to Kathmandu with the money. After some debate, we decided to use the money to enroll the woman’s child in school, and this child was the first, in a community of 500 people, to ever set foot inside of a school.

Today our non-profit organization is called Quilts for Kids Nepal, and we have maintained that same simple formula for the past 20 years: The mothers in our community make quilts, we sell them around the world, and the sale of one quilt covers the cost of putting a child in school for one entire year. Currently we are sponsoring the education of 73 girls. Three of them are in nursing college, and one of them just recently graduated from Sweet Briar College in Virginia and is getting her Master’s degree at in Business Analytics at UMass Boston. There are about 15 women making a sustainable income for themselves and their family by making the quilts.

Quilts for Kids Nepal is a small project but we’re following a “small is beautiful” model, which, instead of trying to expand the scope of the organization, focuses our resources and expertise in a single community and tries to do it very well. We’re very proud of the fact that several of our kids have finished high school and have managed to secure actual salaried jobs – something that was previously unheard of in the community. Through education, these young women are actually changing the structure of their community, and I’ve had the good fortune to be part of that change.

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Meet the Author

Michael Clinton is a best-selling author, new longevity expert, thought leader, and keynote speaker on the changing face of what it means to live longer. He is also a writer-at-large for Esquire, and regular columnist for Men’s Health. A former president and publishing director of Hearst Magazines, he now serves as the special media advisor to the Hearst Corporation’s CEO.

He is also a photographer, has traveled through 124 countries, has run marathons on 7 continents, has started a nonprofit foundation, is a private pilot, is a part owner of a vineyard in Argentina, holds two master’s degrees, and still has a long list of life experiences that he plans to tackle.

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