Need for certification !!

Is there anytime in professional (or personal) life when we say... life is routine. Though it may not be exactly, because we may do things or tasks in some different way everyday, but still we may feel there is no zeal to do. Then at that time we need to sit back and analyse.. am i doing something different or new.. do i want to do something different to get going the enthusiasm. Well it may learning to do a new task or technology or tool or concept or anything. We may be "too busy" in our work life but that does not mean we need to stop learning new things. Learning in later stages of life may come mostly from the need rather than the interest. But as long as there is that feeling to do something new or satisfaction that it made the difference.. it is enough.
There are instances for both these cases in my life
Need - We were doing manual testing for some of our projects and though we wanted to learn automated tools, we never took off time from work for it. The project that we were working on was a very big one and had a lot of scope to learn automation as there was much of regression and retesting to do. But when suddenly there was a requirement from the client, then there was a rush in the team to try out various tools. So the urge to learn and try something new came from need.
Interest - I was getting bored of the routine chores at work.. testing the application, etc.,.. so wanted to do something different. Then came the idea and interest to do a certification wherein i need to put efforts to read the concepts, understand them and corelate with the work that i was performing. Though there were many things that i did at work, for some of them i actually did not know the terminology untill i read the book/material or related articles. Undertaking a certificate is really a boring thing which needs a lot of interest and urge to do it (depends on the certification though). so this needs interest.
One way for learning is certification. We may not be learning everything new required in the certification but may also be implementing things in that, like the ISTQB certification for basic level has many concepts that we are actually implementing in our daily work. Though most of us may feel why do we need to do certification when we know many things that may not be covered in that certification or for that matter there may not be a need for someone to certify that we know something, it may be one of the tools to let people know that we are well qualified. like we may do a educational course but the certificates of the course only tell that we actually did it or prove the fact of our course. Certification in most instances may be a way to market ourselves, our organization.
But we need to realize that either as a need or interest it is definetely a value addition in our life.