The trick with the mast was never about strength
Odysseus didn't outlast the Sirens. He made sure his future self never got a vote.
The story gets told as a parable about resolve: Odysseus wanted to hear the Sirens' song, so he had his men tie him to the mast, and he gritted it out. But the detail everyone drops is the wax. Before the ship got close, Odysseus packed his crew's ears with beeswax so they were deaf to the song entirely. He didn't ask his men to resist temptation alongside him. He removed their ability to hear the offer.
He also gave orders in advance, while he was still thinking clearly, that they were to ignore anything he said or did once the singing started — including his pleading to be untied. By the time the temptation arrived, present-tense Odysseus had no authority left. Past Odysseus had already overruled him.
This is the part self-control advice keeps missing. We treat willpower as a contest between a tempted self and a disciplined self, fought in real time, and we keep looking for ways to make the disciplined self stronger. Odysseus's actual plan skipped the contest. He never trusted himself to win it. He built a structure — deaf sailors, standing orders, rope — that made his in-the-moment preferences irrelevant.
Modern versions of this exist wherever a decision gets locked in before the tempting moment arrives: the automatic transfer that empties the account before payday temptation shows up, the phone left in another room before the show starts. None of them ask you to be stronger. They just make sure weaker-you doesn't get consulted.