Jennifer Lankford.
Jennifer Lankford
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jennifer Lankford, the 45-year-old CEO of Lankford Communications, who relocated to Costa Rica. The following has been edited for length and clarity.I'm the CEO of Lankford Communications, and I live in Jaco, Costa Rica. I formerly lived in Portland and the Bay Area. My company is remote.I've spent the past 20+ years in strategic communications and PR. I worked for several tech companies before becoming a senior marketing manager at Intel. When my business unit dissolved, I took a role at a startup called Buoyant in 2017, and then was poached into a senior role at a high-growth security startup, which, at the time, felt like I "finally made it."It seemed like a prestigious role, and I was really starting to move up the ladder in my career with a big role at the hot new startup in town. Things didn't turn out the way I expected, and I was fired from the security startup in January 2019.I had previously consulted between roles, so I dove back in and built my own PR consultancy. I also decided to leave my life behind and move to Costa Rica. I'm so happy here.I was fired a few months before the startup's acquisitionBeing let go from an exciting startup was jarring. It happened abruptly and sent me into a spiral of self-doubt. In hindsight, it was simply a bad fit, and one I should have seen sooner. The culture's values didn't align with mine.I had tied much of my identity and self-worth to my success in that role, but once the initial shock wore off, I realized I felt more relieved than angry. Instead of rushing back into another similar job, I asked myself a more fundamental question: For what kind of life am I actually optimizing?
