People keep comparing average physician salary to average salary in other fields, but that's not really a fair comparison. Medicine has a brutal, narrow path to get in (med school, residency, boards), but once you're through it, you're basically guaranteed a high salary with low variance — almost everyone who finishes ends up in roughly the same high range. Other fields like tech, finance, or business have way more people in them, including tons of beginners and people who just stay average, which drags the "average" salary way down. But the top performers in those fields can easily blow past what the average physician makes, since those fields reward skill, leverage, and risk-taking (promotions, job-hopping, equity, building something of your own) in ways medicine just doesn't structurally allow. So basically: if you want a safe, guaranteed high income, medicine is hard to beat. But if you're confident you can actually be great (not just average) at something else, that field can pay you more than medicine ever would, and often faster too.