What's your advice to stay motivated and fight laziness? How to avoid being a wasted potential?
I wish I had the answer. I struggle with apathy and lethargy a lot. I have work to be done, and often just don't do it. The short answer is to just get off your web browser and do what needs to be done. It's so trivial in theory, but in practice, there is a sense of inertia when it comes to exercising will. Aim to find a job/education that intellectually stimulates you, especially when there is a 'playful learning' aspect to it, as INTPs (or at least one's like me) will struggle to do anything if it's too boring.
INTPs (or at least me) tend to become avoidant when bossed around or organized by others, so having others organize you isn't a good strategy. Put your goals, to do lists, objectives, into writing, imagine there is an ESTJ in your head bossing you around. It all comes down to just fighting the laziness, doing the work, and the more work you do, the more momentum is gained.
Record your thoughts and ideas, if you come up with something interesting when musing to yourself, write it down, make a youtube video, keep a record of your Ti-Si, we come up with great ideas and thoughts all the time, but most stay in our heads. All thoughts eventually evaporate away if kept inside, which is a sad waste. Find ways of getting your ideas out and expressing yourself.
The irony about INTPs is that they are bored almost all the time, yet possess the ability to make almost anything interesting*
If something is boring, think of how you could make it interesting.
How's your relationship with Ne and Si? What are the positives, the negatives?
I've been meaning to do an essay about INTP functions and how they manifest subjectively for me. I will give you a detailed reply about this at some point, as this is a good question.
If you had to generalize, what would you say is the INTP's greatest strength?
A playful curiosity that leads to a unique and deep learning style. INTPs can truly 'know' the gestalt of how something works, then as they learn new facts about the system, the facts are encoded intuitively, so rather than simply recalling the discrete piece of information, they modify their understanding of the system as a whole, so that they can recall the fact synthetically. They can have 'encyclopedias' of facts about a system, without it even feeling like memorizing, because they can intuitively 'guess it' when it's required. This approach is flexible and promotes creativity. It's a unique cognitive style that has its pitfalls but with the right conditions gives us minds like Einstein. Despite it not being in the first four under MBTI, in socionics, LII (the sociotype complementary to INTP) has Ni as a Demonstrative Function, this I believe plays a part of the holistic understanding of systems, as they are able to have Ni 'within' Ti. I need to articulate this idea better, as I fear I'm not expressing it as clearly as I'd like to.