Why I Can’t Leave Anything Alone: Confessions of an Aries Control Freak

It’s Not a Flaw, It’s a Star Sign (Allegedly)

I’ll say this as tongue-in-cheek as it deserves: I have a deep, borderline compulsive need to control nearly every part of anything I make. If you’re into astrology, you’ll probably nod along when I mention I’m an Aries — the sign that supposedly can’t resist taking the wheel, literally and figuratively. I’m not going to pretend I believe my birth chart explains my personality. But it’s a fun enough shorthand for something that’s clearly true about me regardless of why: given the choice between delegating a piece of a project and just learning to do it myself, I have never once chosen delegation.

Exhibit A: My Music

Take my music. I build the PCs and network the whole thing runs on. I install, configure, and operate every piece of software in the chain. On the actual record, these days I’m the musician playing and singing the parts (although I have also enjoyed music collaborations too!), the writer and composer behind them, and the producer and arranger shaping how they fit together — usually the mixing engineer too, and sometimes the mastering engineer, depending on the project.

Once the audio’s done, I direct and produce the music videos, shoot the photos and footage myself, and edit all of it together, too. Once a track is actually finished, I’m the one setting up the domain, hosting, and e-commerce website it lives on, doing the SEO work so people can actually find it, arranging how it gets distributed, running the social media that tells people it exists, and tracking the stats afterward to see if any of it actually worked. There’s genuinely no stage of that pipeline I’ve handed to someone else by default — only ever by deliberate choice, and only for the pieces where doing it myself would make the result worse, not just slower.

Exhibit B: My Car Projects

Cars get the same treatment, just with a different flavor of control. I’m not under the hood doing every single modification with my own two hands — but before a single part gets bought, I’ve usually done deep enough research to know exactly what I want, why, and how it fits with everything else already on the car. The flex fuel setup on my M3 is a good example of exactly that process. Choosing a shop or a specialist to actually execute a piece of the build isn’t me stepping back from control. It’s me making sure the person doing the hands-on work is executing my vision faithfully.

The Upside of Being Like This

I don’t think this is really about willpower, or even about being unusually skilled at a dozen unrelated things. It’s closer to just not being able to tolerate a gap between what’s in my head and what actually gets made — and the only way I’ve found to close that gap reliably is to be the one closing it. Whether that’s an Aries thing, a stubbornness thing, or just how I’m wired, I’ve mostly stopped trying to talk myself out of it.

If you want to hear where all of that control actually ends up, that’s my music over at Rainer Willeke Music. And if you’d rather have help building the kind of infrastructure that makes doing this much yourself possible in the first place, that’s what Raindog Solutions is for.