Question for CCIEs

Those of you who are CCIEs: Do you feel you learned a lot by studying for your certification?

For example I remember when I was studying for CCNA that I did learn a lot of stuff, both through my job and through going through the curriculum. To be fair I was at the absolute bottom, and the only way to go was up. I thought TCP ports, where like physical holes where you plugged connectors :).

Then a lot of time passed, I learned a lot more just through working, about networking in general not just Cisco related stuff but I didn't study for any particular certification. When studying for my CCNP, I learned very little that I didn't already know (private vlans, MST, that you can give names to interface ranges, that you can to tests on a cable with the tdr commands, OSPF zones and LSA types but that's about it). The exams themselves where a giant PITA with a huge amount of trivia that I had to learn by heart and that I have no use for in the real world since it's a Google search away if I really need it. And I'm the guy that always baffles his friends by remembering some odd bit of trivia from more than a decade ago.

I learned a lot more by reading the fundamental networking books (Radia Perlman's Interconnections, TCP Illustrated, Doyle's Routing TCP/IP, John T. Moy's OSPF - Anatomy of an Internet protocol, Alex Zinin's - Cisco IP routing), even though these books discuss protocols that are now dead (the OSI stack, ATM, CLNP, IPX). But through that they give perspective - if all you know is TCP/IP because that's all you ever used, do you really know how and why things work the way they do and how this all came to be? Some of these protocols didn't die because they lacked technical merit, a lot of them did because of politics and there are valuable lessons to be learned by looking at what ended up on the cutting room floor.