It is hard not to feel affected by the death of  Steve Jobs  this week. After all, we were all so affected by his life.  Of the many articles The New York Times ran on Job’s death, the one called Steve Jobs’ Patents was the most eye-opening. You come away with the breadth of the man’s creativity and ingenuity.  From the desktop, to the variety of media devices, from adapters to Apple TV, to the iPad and beyond, he seemed to have no limits to his vision. And all of this from a college drop-out.

The other day, I read to my students Jobs’ commencement speech given at Stanford University in 2005 . The speech is incredible on a number of levels: it is a truly inspirational speech told in a concise, simple language that makes it easy to follow.  It is an ideal speech for school-age children and speaks to a number of things that they need to hear: working hard, believing in yourself and learning how the things you do now will matter later in life, even when you can’t always make that connection. Here is what he says about taking a course on calligraphy – not exactly the subject choice of great business icons:

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Not the most auspicious beginning for the man who became the major innovator of the last 50 years.  A college dropout, taking courses in calligraphy and other courses that he simply had an interest in, as opposed to those classes that he “needed” according to the university, Jobs’ life path looked more like that of the ne’er-do-well child who wanders the globe seeking his life’s calling than one of the visionary who revolutionized technology in the 20th and 21st centuries.

No one could have guaranteed that Jobs would have the success that he did, least of all Jobs.  He admits himself that he took chances, that he went with his gut. A lot of people do this and end up with nothing. Following one’s instincts lead as many people to jail, or to stints on reality TV, as it does to entrepreneurial success.  But, along with his gut instincts, Jobs had so much else – he had supportive parents, who were there for him (after all, he had to use someone’s garage to build the first Macintosh, right?), who demonstrated faith in him and who instilled in him those intangible qualities that contribute so much to anyone’s success -  faith, heart, fortitude, perseverance.

Jobs certainly needed all of these things during his career.  A millionaire by 30 and jobless. My students were shocked to learn how he lost control of his own company and how he found himself, in his own words, devastated. An excellent lesson in getting back up when you are knocked down, of not letting bad events determine the outcome of the rest of your life (or in my charges’ case, the rest of the school year). For a bit there he lost a little faith in himself and he lost a little heart, but he still had fortitude and he had the perseverance to move forward – instead of fading away and becoming a trivia question. He bounced back, adding to his resumé the creation of the first digitally-animated film and the renaissance of Apple.

You can’t find the intangibles in the Common Core Standards. There is no list of skill sets or sub-skill sets that can help a teacher foster these qualities in their students. These qualities are qualities that need to be coached, coaxed, nurtured and reinforced continuously throughout the year. You hope that your students are listening to you, that what you are teaching them  is sinking in and may one day take hold, but you don’t really know when your work in this area will come to fruition.

What I hope my students learned from listening to Steve Jobs’ speech, and to the story of his life, is that life has no certainties for us. It holds possibilities which are not always what we want them to be nor think they should be. No one chooses to lose their job, or the company that they started in their parents’ garage. No one can plan for disappointment or failure. What you want, however, is to have the ability to bounce back from both disappointment and failure, to have the fortitude, the perseverance, the faith and the heart to get yourself up off the floor and get back in the game, to not quit.  If there is one thing that teachers do that is more important than anything else, it is teaching children to finish what they start and not quit. There is no test to measure this quality; there is no way to evaluate the effectiveness of this lesson. It takes years to see the final result. It often takes a lifetime.