This feels like an ivory tower take. I worked at a job reentry program. The difference in outcomes between those working hard and those not looked pretty stark to me. Ignore the billionaires. Focus on what you can control.
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.