How do I protect my creative vision without becoming a tyrant?

You are trying to protect a true vision through all the compromise that making anything with other people requires, without either selling it out or turning into a tyrant to defend it. That is one of the hardest balances in creative work. Hold too loosely and the vision dissolves. Hold too tightly and you crush the very people who could make it better. The way through is to know which parts of the vision are the heart and which are just your first idea of how to reach it. The heart, the truth you are trying to tell, you protect fiercely. The details of how to get there, you can hold loosely, and often the people around you will find a better road than you would have alone. Collaboration is not the enemy of vision; rigidity is. So before the next hard disagreement, name to yourself the one thing this piece must not lose. Defend that without apology, and stay genuinely open on the rest. You will find you can be both uncompromising and generous, firm at the core and flexible at the edges. That is not selling out, and it is not tyranny. It is how real things get made.