Certification finished but the journey has just begun

So Tuesday I sat my Certified Ethical Hacker exam after about three months of study.  I felt well prepared but was surprised about how easy the exam really was.  I sat down and started the exam at 0930 and by 1010 I had my passing score.  I think the key to success was several thing:  1)  creating a lab and actually playing with the tools every night.  This was by far the most fun part of studying for the exam.  I used Virtualbox as my virtualization platform on my laptop.  I then created a couple of virtual machines.  Kali Linux was my pen testing suite of choice.  Most of the tools covered in the exam were on this distribution.  Though I did go and download the Nessus Vulnerability scanner to play around with on top of the Kali distro.  I then downloaded a vulnerable Metasploitable ISO image and created a Windows XP virtual machine to hack apart.  I used a few books to study and learn from that I downloaded to my Kindle.  The Basics of Hacking and Penetration Testing by Patrick Engebretson was a nice, easy introduction to the tools.  The CEH Certified Ethical Hacker All-in-One Exam Guide and CEH Certified Ethical Hacker Practice Exams both by Matt Walker proved to be good guides to the test and were easy reads as well.  That's pretty much it.  And several hours dedicated to studying and playing with the tools every day.  In the end, I feel better for having done it.  Do I feel like a hacking genius?  No, I feel like I've just opened the door to a much wider body of knowledge and my journey into bettering myself as a security professional has just begun.  To that end, I've continued my studies every night, playing with the tools and looking at hacking methodologies to better understand how to defend against them.  I know that was brief and I don't want to downplay the sheer amount of time I dedicated to study and practice.  However, if you use the tools I've outlined here and dedicate time for study, it is not an insurmountable challenge.  Good luck!