We tell job seekers: "Build your own career." How do you teach that?

A few hours ago, as part of an onstage discussion at the giant SXSW Edu conference in Austin, Texas, I asked three experts on education/workforce policy to share a personal highlight from school days or their first job -- that opened the door to enduring success.

Their answers turned out to be rueful, funny and provocative. Nobody cited long-ago pointers from a favorite teacher or boss. Nobody reminisced about an A+ term paper, or a $50 bonus check from a boss. Instead, everyone volunteered something edgier.

John Bailey, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, spoke about the excitement of skipping school to learn about deep-sea exploration. Phyllis Lockett, co-founder and CEO of Leap Innovations, recalled an early job handling computer tapes, and her abrupt realization that old skills rapidly give way to new ones. Kristn Sharp, executive director of the Shift Commission on Work, Workers and Technology, owned up to a mentoring misadventure that ended up with lots of second-graders locked up in a supply closet.

Yet as Sharp herself pointed out, such zany examples of coloring outside the lines actually have a larger significance. We're letting go of the old norm of "being good at your job by following directions and implementing effectively," she observed. Instead, "we're moving to a world where you'll be creating what you want your job to be."

Lockett, in particular, has been testing out new ways of helping grade-school students get the hang of a far-more fluid workplace. Her organization, Leap Innovations, works with schools in Chicago and elsewhere to help students develop growth mindsets and a better sense of self-regulation. Students help set their own learning goals and feel more responsible for making headway.

Lockett sees a big future for customized, digital teaching that lets the quickest learners race ahead, while students who need more time to get the hang of a hard concept can keep practicing until they achieve mastery, too. "We've let too many students fall through the cracks on both ends," she says. She's counting on technology-assisted, "personalized learning" to help each student in a class achieve some measure of success.

As our panel discussion played out, audience members liked the goals of this new educational movement -- but wanted to make sure that rosy excitement didn't overlook the hard work of implementation. Some attendees wanted to know if the goals of personalized learning were compatible with public school workloads that often put subject teachers in charge of 125 or more students. Others had jitters about the ways that student data could be mishandled.

My favorite idea in the bunch: Sharp's suggestion that schools break down the traditional barriers between subjects, so that a science experiment about dropping objects off a high ledge can also turn into a math lesson, an excursion into poetry about flight and falling, and so on. Such linkages are part of everyday life; the ability to fit them all together is a key element of modern-day leadership and innovation.

Yet it's also important to realize that we shouldn't be asking schools to do everything. If we really want students to take charge of their own learning, we need to appreciate the rebels who skip school to pursue something they found on their own. It may be that some strengths -- such as grit, resilience and effective advocacy of a point of view -- can't always be taught in school from beginning to end.

Sometimes these newly rediscovered virtues just have to be lived. And if there's a bit of friction along the way, that's part of the learning, too.

If you've ever been a classroom rebel, and can look back on those moments with defiant pride, share your story in the comments below.