The older I get, the more I try to simplify my life. If I’m writing, I ask myself if I can get to the point quicker and still be thought-provoking. And if I’m drawing, I ask myself if I can say it in fewer lines but achieve a fulsome, engaging picture.

The more we learn, the more tempting it may become to overcomplicate our work. And let’s not forget the age-old desire to out-do our competition. Some people would call this having a healthy ego. I call it a recipe for disaster. I often reflect on one of my early teachers’ who called the ego “the guru of all transgressions.”

But consider Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. The plot is very simple: residents from a poor farming village enlist the help of seven ronin samurai to help defend it from bandits intent on stealing their crops. Many movies, including Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, were based on Kurosawa’s classic. Why? What makes the Seven Samurai narrative so engaging? Beyond Kurosawa’s direction, it’s how fully defined the character of each samurai is, and how invested we viewers become in the nobility of their aim: self-sacrifice for a group of strangers most others deem pathetic and unworthy of support.

Conflict and a group of honourable people directed to take action by a shared moral compass make for all sorts of compelling adventures. Quite frankly, this describes many of my artistic compadres: we are all united under the common goal of making our art come to life. We all struggle. Some struggles are character-testing, like self-doubt and anxiety. Other struggles are financial and material – like the farmers from the Seven Samurai, we labour under the pressure to care for the welfare of our families. Sometimes we face bandits intent on stealing our work. However, if we can invoke the ideal of the samurai – perform simple acts, remain in the moment, be disciplined and resist distractions – we can face the risks and engage the burdens with which we live as we share the beauty of life. “A focused mind,” as the Japanese proverb says, “can pierce through stone.”