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In Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best, Angela Duckworth explores how your situation—the objects around you, your peers, your mentors, your physical environment—shapes who you become. In this excerpt, she explains her central framework: the three boxes model of human behavior (situation, thoughts, response) and how understanding this can help you reverse-engineer your own behavior and make intentional changes to your circumstances.

This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

John Dickerson:Now that you’ve been on a book tour for a while, what is your simplest way of helping people understand? 

Angela Duckworth: The power of the will?

… the thesis of this book? Yeah.

I mean, willpower is a great word by the way, right? The “power of the will.” The science of willpower is that there is part of the brain toward the front, toward the lateral prefrontal........

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