For me, reading non-fiction books allows me to interact with historical figures and understand how they approached problems as well as how they arrived at their solutions. I've been reading many auto/biographies lately and more and more it has helped me realize that most over-night successes are really 20 years in the making.

edit: Another thing that has helped me is in learning grammatically correct english and sentence construction. This is something that I have yet to find in abundance on the web.