One of the most financially rewarding career moves I've ever made was to give up the manual labor jobs I had as an field archaeologist and start focusing on "easier" tech jobs. Hard work is at best mildly correlated with financial rewards, though a 5 minute conversation with most workers would quickly disabuse you of even that notion.
I had a similar thought process in my teens, my dad was a building surveyor which was a very middle class job back in the day. But it dawned on me that there's only so many building you can walk in and look at in a day, limiting your upside potential.
It seems that you are paid for how many lives you affect (and to a lesser degree - by how much you affect them), rather than how much work you do.
