How do you identify which part is broken?

Look at the specific moments that drain you versus the moments that feel alive. If you love the craft but hate the decisions being made for you, autonomy is the break. If you have full control but the output feels pointless, purpose is the break. The musician analogy is the key: the named thing (the craft) is rarely the actual broken part.

What if multiple parts are broken?

It happens, but start with the one closest to the surface. Surface-level fixes (different team, different project, adjusted role) are cheap and reversible. If fixing the surface layer does not help, move one layer deeper. This prevents you from making an irreversible change when a reversible one would have been enough.

When is quitting the right move?

When the broken part is the core itself: the purpose or the craft. If the work produces nothing you find worthwhile and that is structural to the role, no rearrangement of surface conditions will fix it. But confirm this by first testing whether a cheaper repair (new team, more autonomy, different project) changes the feeling. Quitting belongs at the end of diagnosis, not the beginning.

Diagnose the Broken Part of Work Before You Quit

The work feels wrong, and almost everyone reaches straight for the biggest, most expensive move on the board: quit. But a job is not one indivisible thing that is simply good or bad. It is built from many parts. A couple of them are the core, the thing the job fundamentally is. The rest sit nearer the surface and are cheaper to change. Usually only one or two parts are the actual problem.

The Musician Misread

You have probably watched this pattern up close. Someone who has played an instrument since they were nine announces they have fallen out of love with it. Sometimes that is exactly what happened. More often they have spent four years playing the same repertoire, for an audience that wanted background noise, in a room where nobody could hear the quiet parts. Give them a different room and a piece that scares them and the love is back inside an hour.

The craft was never the broken part. It was just the only part they had a name for.

The Diagnostic Layers

Before you tear the whole thing down, find where the break actually is. From the core of the job outward to its surface:

Purpose - the work produces nothing you find worthwhile.
The work itself - the underlying craft, on its own, is simply not for you.
Autonomy - you follow instructions and exercise no judgment of your own.
Growth - you have stopped learning or becoming better.

None of these is a property of the job alone. Each is a point where your map of what work should be gets compared against the job's reality. Your side is the fixed part. The job's side changes from room to room, which is why almost all of these can be repaired without leaving.

Why the Craft Belongs Last

Switching fields is the one fix you cannot test cheaply and the only one you cannot walk back. So the craft belongs at the end of the diagnosis, not the beginning. Most people start there because "the work" feels like a single block, when it is actually many separable parts. Someone whose real problem is autonomy will carry that same problem into any new field and conclude, again, that they chose wrong.