You might find it really difficult to be truly good at programming if you are doing it for the 'glamour' of a high-paying job. Often to be good at coding, you need to have a genuine passion that you will use to force yourself to FIND what the heck is wrong with the code you've just written as well as be interested by the different ways in which your peers solve the same problem.
HOWEVER! C++ is the programming language that, in my opinion, is most versatile, accessible and probably 'popular' in terms of the bulk of low-level programming.
It's more important that you learn HOW to learn programming though. When you go to work for a big I.T. company, they'll most likely train you on a different, new and flashy code and/or if you're really in it for the money - you can jump the pack and become one of these high-demand programmers just by learning the new, trending code. (The emergence of Ruby and Python were/are examples of this).