As I’ve been writing in this blog, finding, establishing, growing, and sharing your brand are the four critical steps to industry influence. And part of this comes from education, which goes beyond the books and traditional learning.

Sure, many of us need the right degrees. I went to dental school, which is one element that goes into my becoming a dental expert. But I’m also continually educating myself to establish my niche within the dental industry. This is separate from my online industry influence.

How to Tell Your Expert Story

My “expert story” in dentistry is connecting the health of your teeth with the diet you consume. Each time patients come in, I go through their diet and they are amazed that no dentist ever talks about that. For example, I explain to patients that with the food they’re eating, to make sure that they’re not having an overly acidic diet, which can erode your teeth. Acidic foods include coffee, alcohol, and processed foods. Some people are now proponents of an alkaline diet—full of fruits, vegetables, and legumes. I’m not here to give diet advice: this is just to share how continual education contributes to an ongoing expert story.

Now, as I write, hundreds of thousands of us have even more expertise by education, emerging from the COVID-19 crisis. Even if we haven’t spent the spare time during the stay-at-home order, we’ve learned by simply listening to or reading the news about how to quarantine ourselves, how to shop for medical necessities; and how to cope with stress and anxiety. These skills are valuable not just for a one-time pandemic, but for any emergency that arises in the future. In 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly 50 percent of Americans lacked even a basic emergency kit in their homes—coronavirus changed that statistic for certain.

U.S. households, for example, took some tips from the 5,000-member Reddit group called “PandemicPreps,” whose members keep all the essentials on hand for emergencies. “A prepper is a person,” one anonymous person told TIME magazine, “who takes measures in advance to ensure the economic, physical and emotional well-being of their family during times of struggle.”

What Does This Make Possible?

We’ve learned even more from our online communities in the age of social distancing. We’ve seen Instagram posts on growing gardens. We’ve shared creative ideas on at-home graduations through Facebook. And we’ve learned how to turn isolation and loneliness to solidarity and solitude from LinkedIn—not to mention the millions of ideas from the millions of tweets filling our feeds.

Dan Miller, the author of 48 Days to the Work You Love, often writes, “What does this make possible?”

The answer is everything education is everywhere, and opportunities can turn up at any time. And don’t worry about an overly acidic diet—we’ve all been drinking more than our share of coffee and scarfing takeout pizza during these peculiar times.