Love It Or Leave It
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Clarke's coaching model for career dissatisfaction, and the structure of her book. The title is deliberately provocative but the method refuses the binary: before anyone makes the revolutionary step of quitting, they run the "love it" side — building self-awareness about how they interact with the work, the people and the context, then making tweaks and watching how they ripple. Only if that genuinely fails does the "leave it" side apply, and it comes with precautions rather than a leap: money, connections and wellbeing through the transition, plus a decision about whether the destination is another job or a portfolio career. The model exists because most people who jump without doing the love-it work find the same problems waiting in the new place.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Refuse the all-or-nothing framing
Reject the tug of war between staying miserable and quitting outright. Both sides of the coin are worth examining, and the revolutionary step is rarely the first move.
- 2
Run the love-it audit
Interrogate how you actually work: how do you work effectively, who do you work with, what type of work do you enjoy, and where are you flatlining throughout the day? This is self-awareness about your interaction with the space, the people and the context of work.
- 3
Tease out what is already good
Deliberately hone in on what works instead of cataloguing complaints, then ask how you can get more of that. Complaint is easy; naming the parts that function is the harder and more useful move.
Pro tip Look for the kernels or seeds of joy, purpose and alignment already present in the existing role.
- 4
Make tweaks and watch the ripple
Change something small in how you work, who you work with, or how the day is shaped, and observe how the effect spreads. The point is to test whether the role is fixable before declaring it broken.
- 5
Separate the job from yourself
Ask honestly whether the problem is the company or a pattern you carry. Clarke repeatedly meets people who left, started somewhere new, and found the same problems waiting.
Watch out If you skip this step you will export the problem into the next role and repeat the cycle.
- 6
If leaving, set the precautions
The leave-it side is not a leap. Work through money, your connections and your wellbeing across the transition before moving. These are the guardrails that make a departure survivable.
- 7
Choose job or portfolio career
Decide what you are leaving into. For many people the reason they want out is that they do not fit a single box, which points to a portfolio career rather than another job with the same shape.
In the wild
Clarke describes readers who tell her the book made them question whether leaving had been the right decision in the first place. They had already gone, started somewhere new, and found the same problems present in the new organisation. The conclusion they reach is that they were the constant, not the company. Running the love-it side first would have surfaced that before the move, and either fixed it in place or made the exit a deliberate choice rather than an escape.
→ Recognition that the pattern travelled with them, not the employer.
A large share of the people who come to Clarke say plainly that they had no intention of leaving — they simply want to make what they are doing better. The love-it half of the model is built for exactly this reader: exercises broken down across people, job role and sector, plus the six pillars, aimed at extracting more of what already works rather than manufacturing a reason to quit.
→ The role improves without a career change being required.
Common mistakes
Jumping from the frying pan into another fire
Assuming purpose is over there, in a job you have no prior knowledge or insight about. Without the love-it work you are trading a known set of problems for an unknown one.
Treating it as love it or quit today
The model is not binary. Reading it that way skips the tweaks, the audit and the precautions, which is where most of the actual result comes from.
Leaving with no financial or social runway
Skipping the money, connections and wellbeing precautions turns a considered transition into a crisis that pushes you into the next available job.
From the transcript
“i just don't want to do that revolutionary step of just quitting and leaving and i don't think we have to i don't think it…”
“i want people to really question how do you work effectively who do you work with what type of work do you enjoy where are…”
“yeah like this is how you leave it and these are the precautions that you take when you're thinking about leaving it so you know…”
From the episode
How To Design Your Career For Happiness - Samantha Clarke
Samantha Clarke