This is a 10 step guide to taking back your time and freedom and discovering how you want to live. The norms that guide us through life are highly negotiable. If you're bold enough to break a couple key societal conventions, you can free up your time and money and learn to move to the rhythm of your own drum.

Here's how to take back your life, in 10 simple, yet not so easy steps:

People often ask me how I afford to travel so much. Where do I find the time? How do I make enough money?

It's all actually quite simple. I think anyone could replicate what I do. I did my best to explain in "GO." my guide to cheap, unconventional travel, but I want to elaborate on one of the most important, yet often overlooked concepts I live by that allow such freedom. I call it leaky bucket economics.

I literally think of my personal finances as a leaky bucket. Each one of us has a bucket. The money we earn flows into our bucket. The money we spend leaks out. If someone makes $30,000 in a year and is able to save $20,000, they've got one well-patched bucket. In contrast, if someone makes $100,000 a year and spends it all, their bucket has no bottom.

The goal of leaky bucket economics is simple: to patch our inevitably leaky buckets as best as we can. Without money flowing in, we want our buckets to be able to last months, years even, before running empty. Think of it as a sort of financial miles per gallon. On our journey through life, we should strive for a personal finance system with the efficiency of a Prius, not a F-350 Super Duty.