First and foremost, the benefits of reading fiction helps us to understand the human condition; suffering, happiness, love, and hate.
Each novel that you read deals with a character living a chunk of life from a specific point of view. So, it might deal with beliefs, or learning, or a misunderstanding that needs a story experience to reveal to the character a better way of living.
Well written fiction gives you an opportunity to exercise your critical thinking about the different paths of life. A romantic novel may fool you into believing that love is a gift from the gods, or that it just happens to us – and it always comes with tinsel and pretty wrapping, that the hero or heroin must prove themselves before they are worthy of love.
A more serious novel about friendship might show us that Romantic fiction is more on the fantastical side of thinking and has nothing to do with reality. Friendships and alliances make for a stronger bond of love; when we read such novels we instinctively know that it reflects a better reality of life and love than a romantic novel does.
If you can develop your critical thinking abilities it’ll help you in all walks of life, including business. Even though a novel is fiction, the writer will have done their research and tried to keep things within the realms of reality.
On the other hand, when we read books about the heroes journey, we are being swept away into the world of make believe. This make-believe world can serve as a platform where characters act out scenarios that need a little reflection from the reader, it could be that metaphors are used to help a reader grasp the wildly fictional world of a Hobbit, but somehow see how it relates to life in the mundane world of work and families – our world.
It doesn’t matter what the character looks like, or where they live, if their problems are similar to our problems, we will relate to them and begin to think critically about them. Reading fiction puts us into a position where we must know the outcome. The outcome is a solution to those problems.
So, yes, reading fiction will help with developing critical thinking. You might become good at it but discover that you aren’t much good at business.