I’ve noticed a troubling shift in how people live their lives: too many of us have started living inside the news.

This isn’t just about checking headlines too often. When you live inside the news you are letting the news become the main stage of life, while the places where our choices actually matter — our families, our work, our neighborhoods, our creativity — get pushed into the background.

How can you become a great leader when these more important aspects of life are in the background and living in the news cycle is in the foreground?

The problem is simple, but hard to break out of: the news cycle feeds on urgency, conflict, and outrage. It captures attention, but at the same time it denies us agency. We feel emotions, but we don’t shape outcomes. Living in the news guarantees a constant state of distraction and powerlessness.

You can’t lead personally or professionally that way.

You’re never the protagonist, only a spectator in someone else’s drama.

This is where “Thinking from Zero” offers us a reset. In life and in business Thinking from Zero™ is the discipline of stripping away assumptions, starting from nothing, and rebuilding only on the essentials. Applied to the news, it looks like this:

Life Without Headlines: Imagine a world without constant alerts, feeds, or breaking news. What remains? The tangible world: the people you love, the work in front of you, the projects that matter.

Living With Agency: Humans flourish when our actions create results. A meal cooked, a project advanced, a relationship deepened. These restore the foundation of meaning.

Creating Instead of Consuming: Free from the pull of the news cycle, life is designed around contribution, not reaction. You would measure your days by what you built and shared, not by what you scrolled, consumed, reposted, and regurgitated.

Restoring Proportion: Politics and crises still exist, but they belong in their proper place. The news should serve as background, not the central script of your life.

Multiplicative Leverage

This is not just about sanity. It creates leverage that compounds:

• At work, you have deeper focus to produce better results.

• In relationships, your focused attention builds trust and connection.

• In health, reduced anxiety restores clarity and energy.

• For civic life, grounded people make stronger contributors when they choose to engage.

Paradoxically, stepping out of the news makes you more effective when you step back in. Instead of outrage and fatigue, you bring clarity and strength.

That’s real leadership.

Iterative Reset: The Zero Question

The practice is simple. Return to zero regularly. Ask yourself:

• If the news didn’t exist today, what would I do?

• Who would I connect with?

• What would I create?

This question pulls you out of the spectator role and places you back in your own story.

How do we know that politics are broken?

We know that politics is broken because it dominates too much of our lives. It shouldn’t be on the forefront. It should be in the background. It should be only relevant in the months leading up to an election.

When everything is politicized, we see one another as allies or enemies, not as people. Living in the news will continuously feed that division.

If you are to lead effectively you must reclaim focus from the headlines, and when you do you will reclaim your capacity for genuine participation. You preserve energy for real action: volunteering, mentoring, building institutions, solving problems in your community. Refusing to live in the news actually makes you a better citizen by allowing you to engage.

Reclaiming Your Leadership Role

Here’s the truth: if you live in the news, you surrender authorship of your life. You stop leading and instead play a background role in someone else’s story.

The news has value, but only when you approach it as information that strengthens your ability to lead. Being educated on local, national, and international issues matters, but only to the extent that it informs your actions as a leader. Beyond that, it becomes distraction and noise.

So ask yourself today:

If the news didn’t exist, how would I live? What would I create? Who would I connect with? How would I spend my energy?

Your answers to those questions are the beginning of agency, freedom, leverage and more importantly leadership.

Call to Action: If this resonates, share it with someone caught in the cycle of headlines. And if you want more frameworks for reclaiming agency and designing life by Thinking from Zero, subscribe to my future essays in the Mathews Mindset here.