It was the most unforgettable moment in my life. I’ve been through an experience which I don’t think I can handle it anymore in the future. May Allah will always guide me to have a this strong faith and belief  towards what’s right in His side. I admit, you are really precious in my life, but I’ve realized there is something that is way more important and valuable from our love. And in order to reach the most precious and important, I need to choose either one…

******

That night, the gathering was ended early. At 10, everybody was free to do as they wish. The organizer understood our conditions. Everyone must be very exhausted after having a whole day of tiring journey to the program site. They would be surely not hoping for the tentative to be extended till midnight.

            Then suddenly something was tickling my guts to ask a question to one of the facilitators in the seminar room. A question which has haunting my mind for years. I was thinking that it was the best time to ask him about this matter ; coupling. But I was hesitated. ‘What if it’s true, coupling is prohibited in Islam? Should I clash? Aaah, forget it. No worries. Just ask him and go. I’ve done nothing wrong.’

            Slowly I approach the brother’s side. He is reading the Quran Translation by himself.

“Assalamu’alaikum Brother. I’ve a question which is bothering me. Do you mind if I ask you something?”

“Wa’alaikumussalam. Not at all. Have a seat.”

“Erm, the story is some kind like this. Before engaged with this da’wah, I’ve already get to know a friend, a girl. But we were not just an ordinary friend. Can be categorized as best friend.  Quite a what so called, close friends.”

“You are in love?” he asked then.

            I’m very shy to admit that I was coupling. Can’t imagine what the brother would say. He must be angry. But, what excuse can be given? I then nod my head.

“Actually, does coupling is allowed in Islam?”

            With a soft intonation, he replies:

“Akhi, it’s a normal human tendency, the male will be attracted to the female, and vice versa, the female will be attracted to the male. But in Islam, the natural tendency must be controlled and channel to the right place. The social interaction have its limiting boundary. Allah said in the Holly Book, in Surah Al-Israa, Chapter 17, verse 32 :

And do not approach unlawful sexual intercourse (zina). Indeed, it is ever an immorality and is evil as a way.”

 “But, I didn’t see what me and her are doing right now is a path leading to zina. Out intentions are pure. We have been trying our best to avoid any sinful acts. Our SMS were never to be about romance. Even we alternately giving tazkirah for each other. Today my turn and tomorrow she’s. What is wrong with all this?”

I don’t want to give up.

“It’s true, your intention is pure. But one thing we all must remember, our intention will never make a bad deeds become halal. The wrongdoing will always remain as a wrongdoing, and the truth will always remain as a truth. Let us see this verse.”

            He then showed me his Translations and pointed to this verse:

How the people of Ad and Thamud were destroyed is evident to you from their homes. Satan made their deeds seem attractive to them and prevented them from the right path, even though they had visions.

[Al-Ankabut, Chapter 29, Verse 38]

“Akhi, if you understand what Allah is trying to tell us from this verse, what is happening to you is the Syaitan have vague up your view. He have made your deeds seems attractive and good to you. Even though you have a good vision, which is you have deep knowledge in religion. Moreover, it can’t be all the while in your SMS with her, only Allah is in your mind. There must be moments that you just entertaining your desire with her, isn’t it?”

            His words likely to be true…

“It’s true, but we have made a deal. We won’t go out for dating anymore. Because if we meet, it will leads to many sinful acts. And she has agreed. We consistently watch over our acts. Do all these acts still lead us to zina?” I bombarded him with all the excuses.

“Yes, you are right with that. When you didn’t see her anymore, you will avoid your eyes, hands and legs  from doing zina. And if you agreed not to call her anymore, you will avoid your ear and tounge from zina. But akhi, there will still a zina that you won’t be able to avoid while coupling.”

“Zina of the heart?” I guessed.

“Yes. The zina of the heart. These is what our beloved Prophet Muhammad Peace Be Upon Him explained in one of his hadith about approaching zina. You can recheck in Riyadh As-Sholihin, a book of hadith written by Al-Imam An-Nawawi, under the chapter of prohibition of looking at women. The Prophet explained that the zina of eye is seeing. The zina of tongue is talking. The zina of hands is holding. The zina of legs is walking towards sin. And The zina of heart is is to desire, to remember and imagining the girl. The truth is, you will never avoid your heart from doing zina while coupling."

            I was silent still. Speechless. Can’t find a right word to say. All that he said was true. Nothing seems to be deniable. And then he continues.

“Actually, I’ve been to this coupling life. And mine is longer than you. It starts since I was in secondary school until I was almost completed my study in the university. But when I realized that what I’m doing is wrong, I left it immediately. I even have imagine that she will be my future bride, the one that will raise up my children. But praised to Allah, he showed me a better way. Now I’ve married, with someone which is way better than her. Compared to your problem, mine is bigger to solve.”

“But bro,I’m worried. What wil her friends said if we break. I’m the one who really want us to be together.  And I used to request their help to put us together. I’m sure that they all will be really mad at me. And my most concern is about her. What if she can’t accept the truth and done something stupid. We have been really close to each other."

“Even if her friends become mad at you, it doesn’t change anything. What can they do? The worst is the will badmouthing you at your back. Nothing to be loses. Furthermore in da’wah, we want to find Allah’s redha. Just ignore all of those badmouthing towards you. What’s important is Allah’s Redha. Mardhatillah. If Allah didn’t redha, everything else will be useless.

            Again, speechless is the choice.

“And about her, let us think from the positive side. Maybe she will accept your decision full of maturity. Maybe this will be her turning point to improve herself and she also won’t be coupling anymore. I’m sure that she won’t be doing those stupid things. Even if she does, it’s not your responsibility. Everybody will be asked for what he or she have done, not others. That is because she’s the one who chose to act in that way.”

            That’s it. I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t resist myself from crying. It is all crystal clear now. It is very clear that coupling is prohibited in Islam, haram.

“So, what should I do?”

“When I realized about the truth, I just send her one SMS. I explained to her that our relationship is actually not allowed in Islam. Hope we can end it here. Please don’t look for me anymore. Then I change my phone number. Since that time, I’ve never contacted her anymore.”

“Does it means I can’t contact her anymore after this? But I also have other female friends, why can I contact them?”

“Different case applies for her. You already have ‘history’ with her. But if someday you and her will been to the same university fatefully, study in the same course, and needed to work in a group, at that time you just need to treat her as a normal group partner.”

Then this thought came to my mind.

‘Does he want me to break up now? This very night? Wasn’t it’s too soon?’

“Bro, I think I still don’t have the guts to do this. Can I wait till I’m have the will to do so?”

The sentence is just another excuse. But surprisingly he replies,

“Akhi, there’s one thing you need to know. We can’t wait for the guts or strength to come, we need to build it. Even Allah won’t change the condition of a nation until they change their own condition. You can refer to Surah Ar-Ra’du, Chapter 13, verse 11. Moreover, till when will you want to leave this sin. If you want to know, most of the facilitators you’ve seen here were coupling before. But when the engaged with da’wah, they left it.”

            I guess there is no way out. This brother really insists me to clash at this instant.

“Everything is crystal clear now. It seems that I have no choice other than leaving this thing, isn’t it? It feels really hard to press this phone keypad. Feeling incapable to do so.”

“In that case let me type it for you.”

“Eh, no need. Let me do it myself.”

I’m very doubtful at that time. But I enforce myself to do so.

‘Everything is clear now. What for is my doubt? There’s no mean for me to dawdle. I can’t imagine if this feeling to do what’s right is taken back by Allah, I don’t know when I will be granted with this hidayah again. Furthermore, I always pray so that I can leave every sins that still left in me. I’m sure this is the right time.’

Slowly, the message is typed…

"Assalamualaikum..Actually our relationship is not allowed in Islam. I thought that by changing the way we interact, it have been allowed, but it’s still remain as sin. I hope that you will be istiqomah carrying on with all the good changes you’ve done, for Allah sake. I’m sorry for everything happened between us. If we were written to be together, we will meet again. Assalamu’alaikum.."

            It was really hard to send the SMS. I still can’t afford to say goodbye. That’s why in the message I only end with Assalamu’alaikum. After a while, I pushed the send button.

Then, it was written on the phone screen,

SENDING...

MESSAGE SENT

            I felt that half of my life has taken away with the message. It’s unbelievable. I’ve send one SMS and break up with you.

“Thanks bro,”

“No prob, it’s my responsibility.”

            That night is the longest night in my life. I slept with tears running all over my cheek . Unbelievable. Totally unbelievable. I have never thought of breaking up, but actually that is the best for us. Suddenly I recalled this verse 216 from Surah Al-Baqarah, chapter 2,

You may not like something which, in fact, is for your good and something that you may love, in fact, may be evil. God knows, but you do not know.

*****

            The time goes on. I try to make myself busy with anything else other than you. In order to forget about you, it is not easy, but I keep on trying. I always make tazkirah, remind others about the truth. I try to show them the right path according what I found in the Quran and Hadith I’ve learned. I ask them to change. Leave all the sins. Some of them accepted my da’wah. Some of them began to hate me. This time you are not there to hear my all sadness. But I’ve found a better place to lean, to Him, Allah The Al-Hearing.

One morning, after a long silence, I receive a SMS from you. You send me a picture of a flower. And at the end you wrote,

"As beauty as the first touch...

I can feel that you still can’t stop thinking about us. I decided to emphasize my statement. And then I send you the SMS. And it was the last.

"Nothing is more beauty than having Allah’s Redha, Mardhatillah..without without Mardhatillah everything  is useless, even the beauty of the first touch... Assalamu’alaikum..I know I’ve said that if we we written to be together, insya-Allah we will meet in the end. But I hope you are not waiting for it. Forget about me. Let Allah do His job. One more thing, Don’t seek for human’s love.. It is full with betrayal, Full of frustration, and it is temporary. But, Seek for Allah’s love, It is full of loyalty, Full of satisfaction, and it is eternal. That’s the eternal and perfect love, The Ultimate Love... -The Last-“

[SEND]

[SENDING...]

[MESSAGE SENT]

I’ve made up my mind. And I’m very sure that what I’m doing is right. I do this for Mardhatillah. Allah will give me in return, something which is the best for me. And I will never turning back.

NEVER…FOREVER AND EVER…

[In the nature of things,] corrupt women are for corrupt men, and corrupt men, for corrupt women - just as good women are for good men, and good men, for good women. [Since God is aware that] these are innocent of all that evil tongues may impute to them, forgiveness of sins shall be theirs, and a most excellent sustenance!

[An-Nuur, 24:26]

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"Assalamu'alaikum saudara. Saya nak tegur sikit. Saudara telah menggunakan tatabahasa Arab yang salah dalam menulis cerpen saudara."

"Wa'alaikumussalam. Hah, yang mana salahnya?" Sengaja bertanya walaupun telah mengagak apa yang ingin disampaikannya.

"Penggunaan kata ganti diri antum kepada seorang individu. Sepatutnya untuk bercakap dengan seorang, kita akan menggunakan perkataan anta, jika kita sedang bercakap dengan lelaki. Jika dengan perempuan pula, anti. Manakala apabila bercakap dengan lelaki yang ramai pula, barulah kita akan menggunakan antum, untuk perempuan pula antunna," ceritanya panjang lebar.

'Tepat sekali!' jerit hati kecil saya.

"Owh. Itu rupanya, sebenarnya..." saya merespon.

"Jadi harapnya saudara segera membetulkan kesalahan-kesalahan itu, nanti ramai pula kawan-kawan kita yang salah faham dengan penggunaan kata ganti diri Bahasa Arab ini," terangnya terus, sebelum saya sempat meneruskan bicara. Katanya dengan begitu yakin sekali.

"Baik, pertamanya saya ingin mengucapkan ribuan terima kasih atas keperihatinan saudara. Juga ini membuktikan yang saudara membaca cerpen dan artikel-artikel saya. Diharap jika sudah membaca, tinggalkanlah komen. Cikgu saya kata, siapa yang baca blog orang lepas tu tak tinggalkan komen, macam orang buang air besar, tapi tak flush! Haha..tapi itu tiada kaitannya dengan apa yang kita bincangkan sekarang. Kalau saudara nak tahu, saudara adalah orang yang ke-9 yang bertanyakan saya tentang hal ini." Dan kini saya terpaksa menulisnya di dalam salah satu entry blog saya untuk menerangkan kepada semua agar saya tidak perlu lagi menerangkan kepada yang lain tentang hal yang sama. (^_^)

"Hah, kenapa? Salah ke apa yang saya cakap ni? Inilah yang saya belajar di sekolah dulu."

"Ya, apa yang saudara katakan itu ada benarnya. Tetapi jika kita mungkin tidak pernah mendengar tentang Royal Plural."

"Royal Plural? Apa tu? Tak pernah dengar pun?"

"Memang tatabahasa ini jarang dibahaskan oleh orang ramai. Ini merupakan suatu tahap dalam keindahan bahasa-bahasa yang ada dalam dunia ini. Begini. Penggunaan kata jamak ada dua jenis. Plural biasa yang memberi maksud jamak dan Royal Plural yang digunakan untuk menunjukkan pangkat kebesaran seseorang yang dipakai sebagai kata ganti diri bagi mereka-mereka yang berpangkat serta dimuliakan dan mempunyai kebesaran. Konsep ini yang selalu kita baca dalam Al-Quran apabila ada tempat yang Allah membahasakan diriNya sebagai Nahnu yang membawa maksud Kami. Tetapi 'Kami' yang dimaksudkan di situ bukanlah Allah itu ada banyak, tetapi menunjukkan KebesaranNya dan KehebatanNya. Sebab itu ketika Al-Quran ini diturunkan kepada masyarakat Arab, mereka tidak pernah merasa keliru dengan perkara ini kerana memang mereka sudah sedia maklum dalam tatabahasa mereka adanya dua jenis jamak."

"Owh, macam tu ke...tapi tu untuk Allah, macam mana pula dengan kes ini?" Tanyanya kembali.

"Sama juga, kerana bahasa kita agak 'miskin' perbendaharaan kata. Banyak perkataan-perkataan yang menggunakan tatabahasa peringkat tinggi dalam bahasa-bahasa lain yang tidak kita gunakan. Contohnya dalam Bahasa Inggeris, Queen Elizabeth iaitu Ratu United Kingdom juga menggunakan kata ganti diri bagi namanya dengan perkataan 'we' dalam ucapan rasminya yang menunjukkan kebesaran kuasanya dan bukan membawa maksud dia menjadi wakil kepada beberapa raja dan ratu. Untuk pengunaan kata ganti diri kedua yang sama kes dengan penggunaan antum untuk satu individu ini, Bahasa Perancis telah menunjukkan contoh yang baik."

"Oh ya, saya pun pernah ambil Bahasa Perancis. Saya tahu apa yang awak cuba maksudkan. Perkataan 'you' dalam bahasa perancis adalah 'tu'. Tetapi ketika bercakap dengan seseorang yang kita hormat atau orang-orang yang terhormat, kita akan menggunakan 'plural you' iaitu 'vous'. Betulkan apa yang saya cakap ni?"

"Hah..pandai pun. Itulah yang saya cuba maksudkan. Jadi, kesimpulan yang boleh kita bawa di sini adalah, mari belajar Bahasa Arab! Haiyya bil Arabiyah!"

"Betul tu, banyak lagi yang kita perlu pelajari kan? Terima kasih. Pelajaran yang sangat bermakna hari ini. Jazakumullah Khairan Katsiro!"

"Wa-iyya-kum!" Kami bersalaman dan meneruskan urusan masing-masing.

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I have a new guest post on GigaOm today, called Myth: Entrepreneurship Will Make You Rich. Here's an excerpt:

One of the unfortunate side effects of all the publicity and hype surrounding startups is the idea that entrepreneurship is a guaranteed path to fame and riches. It isn’t. Building a startup is incredibly hard, stressful, chaotic and –- more often than not –- results in failure. That doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile thing to do, just that it’s not a good way to make money.

A more rational career path for money-making is one that rewards effort, in the form of promotions, increased security, salary and status. Startups, unfortunately, punish effort that doesn’t yield results. In fact, the biggest source of waste in a startup is building something nobody wants. While in an academic R&D lab, creation for creation’s sake will often get you praise, in a startup, it will often put you out of business.

So why become an entrepreneur instead of developing technology in an R&D lab? Three reasons: change the world, make customers’ lives better and create an organization of lasting value. If you only want to do one of these things, there are better options. But only startups combine all three.

Take this fictional example of a Seedcamp attendee (actually a composite), which I will refer to as Hairbrush 2.0...

Read the rest of Myth: Entrepreneurship Will Make You Rich

Also take a look at the great Hacker News discussion of this essay. It includes several gems, including this comment from davidu:

1) Being an entrepreneur, for me, isn't about being wealthy, it's about being successful.
2) Rich is a variable term, and intended to be so.
Entrepreneurship may not make you wealthy, but it can certainly make you rich.
I enjoy the freedom and independence afforded by starting EveryDNS and OpenDNS. Both contain a passion for a system I love, the DNS, and both have let me help millions of consumers around the world. I even like knowing I control the DNS for millions and millions of Internet users. That's an awesome responsibility and it certainly makes me feel rich about everything I do.
And when it comes to money, Eric is only somewhat right. He says you should get a job that rewards and promotes effort. But lots of lawyers and finance kids in New York thought they had stable jobs that would make them rich. Ask them today and most will tell you a different story altogether. Now they hate their jobs and have no job security or path to becoming really wealthy.
So like I said, being entrepreneur, for me, isn't about being wealthy, it's about being successful. That's a measuring stick that's far more important.

and this one from gits_tokyo:

People that I've spoken with in the past more often than not associated the idea of me doing a startup in the tech industry with gaining massive wealth. While I may entertain this, deep down I find it lacking as there's so much more than wealth to be had.
How about, living in a world... some distant future from the everyday-everyday where day-by-day you toil piecing together a vision, one day injecting it into the present, in order to influence a whole new set of social behaviors while also unfolding valuable opportunities. How about, the day of flipping that proverbial switch, releasing this vision out in the wild. How about, the potential of millions interacting with your vision, it becoming a staple part of a users online experiences. There's something undeniably provoking about all this, rush of my life.
Wealth, although a welcomed aside pales in comparison. Hell I would even go so far as to say, in a world where sex is constantly peddled as a cure all, let me say it, sex pales in comparison to the feeling I get from being an entrepreneur.

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Inc Magazine has a great new piece up about the increasing use of the Minimum Viable Product by businesses (and not just startups). Here's an excerpt; some of my comments are below:

One of the most gut-wrenching moments for a company is the rollout of a new product. A significant swing and miss can break a company's momentum -- and maybe its bank account. Unfortunately, after months or even years of development, many companies discover that customers aren't willing to buy their new wares. That's why some entrepreneurs are trying another approach to product launches: marketing a product online before spending much on research and development or inventory.

Consider the method used by TPGTEX Label Solutions, a Houston-based software company that specializes in bar codes and labels for manufacturers and chemical companies. Like many companies, TPGTEX rolls out new products several times a year. But instead of spending the time and money to develop products on spec, TPGTEX creates mocked-up webpages that list the features of a potential new product -- such as a system for making radio-frequency identification, or RFID, labels -- along with its price. Then, the company spends no more than a few hundred dollars marketing the product through search engines and to the contacts in its sales database and LinkedIn. It isn't until a customer actually clicks or calls to place an order that TPGTEX's developers will build the software. "We do not develop a product until we get a paying customer," says Orit Pennington, who co-founded the six-employee company with her husband in 2002. Development time is typically no more than two to three weeks, and it generally takes just a few orders to cover development costs.

TPGTEX's approach is an example of a trend in business that has been dubbed minimum viable product or microtesting. The idea is to develop something with the minimum amount of features or information needed to gauge the marketability of a product online. That might mean mocking up a website with potential features and seeing how many visitors click on the item. It might also involve buying pay-per-click ads to see how easy it is to gain potential customers. Or it might mean selling a few products on a site like eBay to see how well they perform before ordering in bulk from a wholesaler.

What sets this approach apart from practices like using focus groups is that companies base product development decisions not just on what customers say they want but on how they vote with their wallets.

Read the rest...

This article is part of a trend that has taken me a bit by surprise: the adoption of lean startup techniques outside the traditional domain of high-tech startups. The theory predicts this, of course, because the definition of a startup as “a human institution creating a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty” says nothing about sector, size of company, or industry. Still, it’s always a relief to see practice and theory converge.

Of course, as more people attempt to use the Minimum Viable Product as a tactic, there are a lot of misconceptions possible. The biggest is the confusion over why this tactic is useful. The Inc story, and many others, does a good job emphasizing its lean-ness. By allowing customers to “pull” value from the company in small batches, you reduce the risk of building a product that nobody wants. Like all lean transformations, this is powerful – it increases the value of every dollar invested in new product creation.

But MVP is most powerful when it is used as part of an overall strategy of learning and discovery. And this is the most confusing, because MVP does not pay off under this strategy if we are attempting to build a minimal product. For that, release early, release often will suffice. But if our aspiration is to change the world, we need something more.

The key ideas are customer development, the pivot, MVP, and root cause analysis. Each is described in separate essays on this blog, but let me say a few words about how they work together – especially for companies with big ambitions. Big visions take a long time to develop, and require an exceptionally high degree of product/market fit. That’s just a fancy way of saying: customers have to really, really like your product. Being specific, it means that their behavior powers one of the three fundamental drivers of growth with a large coefficient. But if big products and big visions take a long time to develop, it’s exceptionally risky to build it based on vision alone. That’s because for a big product to take off, it needs to be right in many key respects. Miss just one, and you can find yourself just a few degrees off – and moving with too much momentum to change course. Think Friendster, the “achieving a failure” startup I’ve written about, Apple’s Newton, Webvan, etc. In each of these, the failure of the initial idea led to the failure of the company (or division).

Building an MVP can help mitigate that risk. But it’s not enough. What if customers hate the MVP? Does that mean your product vision is fundamentally flawed, or just that your initial product sucks? There is no way to know for sure. That’s why entrepreneurship in a lean startup is really a series of MVP’s, each designed to answer a specific question (hypothesis). Being systematic about these hypotheses is what customer development is all about. By testing each failed hypothesis leads to a new pivot, where we change just one element of the business plan (customer segment, feature set, positioning) – but don’t abandon everything we’ve learned. In order to work, these pivots have to be heading in a coherent direction, which is why vision is still such a critical part of entrepreneurship, even in a data-based decision making environment. (See “It’s a startup, not a spreadsheet” for more.)

And yet, even that is not enough. The more visionary the entrepreneur, the more difficult it is to really pivot, really seek out what’s in customers’ heads, and really create a minimum viable product. And so startups – great and terrible alike - are prone to give these ideas lip service, but fail to really take maximum advantage. That’s why a process of rigorous root cause analysis is so critical. After every major milestone, the company has to ask: what did we learn? Why didn’t we learn more? And, most importantly, make incremental investments to do better next time. This is the ultimate startup discipline, the hardest to master, and the one that pays biggest dividends. If you can embrace continuous improvement from day one, you can actually speed up as you scale. It’s an awesome thing to watch.

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I am your constant companion. I am your greatest helper or heaviest burden. I will push you onward or drag you down to failure.I am completely at your command. Half the things you do you might just as well turn over to me and I will be able to do them quickly and correctly.

I am easily managed - you must be firm with me. Show me exactly how you want something done and after a few lessons I will do it automatically. I am the servant of all great individuals and, alas, of all failures, as well. Those who are great, I have made great. Those who are failures, I have made failures.

I am not a machine, though I work with all the precision of a machine plus the intelligence of a human. You may run me for a profit or run me for ruin - it makes no difference to me.

Take me, train me, be firm with me, and I will place the world at your feet. 

Be easy with me and I will destroy you.

Who am I?

I am Habit.

Insya-Allah saya akan membahaskan sekitar masalah 'habit' ataupun dalam bahasa ibunda kita, yakni Tabiat. Ia merupakan sesuatu yang amat hebat jika dapat digunakan dengan baik, namun ia merupakan sesuatu yang teramat bahaya apabila diabaikan. Sama-sama kita nantikannya.

 

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I was recently privy to a product prioritization meeting in a relatively large company. It was fascinating. The team spent an hour trying to decide on a new pricing strategy for their main product line. One of the divisions, responsible for the company’s large accounts, was requesting data about a recent experiment that had been conducted by another division. They were upset because this other team had changed the prices for small accounts to make the product more affordable. The larger-account division wanted to move the pricing in just the other direction – making the low-end products more expensive, so their large customers would have an increased incentive to upgrade.

Almost the entire meeting was taken up with interpreting data. The problem was that nobody could quite agree what the data meant. Many custom reports had been created for this meeting, and the data warehouse team was in the meeting, too. The more they were asked to explain the details of each row on the spreadsheet, the more evident it became that nobody understood how those numbers had been derived.

Worse, nobody was quite sure exactly which customers had been exposed to the experiment. Different teams had been responsible for implementing different parts of it, and so different parts of the product had been updated at different times. The whole process had taken. And by now, the people who had originally conceived the experiment were in a separate division from the people who had executed it.

Listening in, I assumed this would be the end of the meeting. With no agreed-upon facts to help make the decision, I assumed nobody would have any basis for making the case for any particular action. Boy was I wrong. The meeting was just getting started. Each team simply took whatever interpretation of the data supported their position best, and started advocating. Other teams would chime in with alternate interpretation that supported their position, and so on. In the end, decisions were made – but not based on any actual data. Instead, the executive running the meeting was forced to make decisions based on the best arguments.

The funny thing to me was how much of the meeting had been spent debating the data, when in the end, the arguments that carried the day could have been made right at the start of the emeting. It was as if each advocate sensed that they were about to be ambushed; if another team had managed to bring clarity to the situation, that might have benefited them – so the rational response was to obfuscate as much as possible. What a waste.

Ironically, meetings like this had given data and experimentation a bad name inside this company. And who can blame them? The data warehousing team was producing classic waste – reports that nobody read (or understood). The project teams felt these experiments were a waste of time, since they involved building features halfway, which meant they were never quite any good. And since nobody could agree on each outcome, it seemed like “running an experiment” was just code for postponing a hard decision. Worst of all, the executive team was getting chronic headaches. Their old product prioritization meetings may have been a battle of opinions, but at least they understood what was going on. Now they first had to go through a ritual that involved complex math, reached no definite outcome, and then proceeded to have a battle of opinions anyway!

When a company gets wedged like this, the solution is often surprisingly simple. In fact, I call this class of solutions “too simple to possibly work” because the people inside the situation can’t conceive that their complex problem could have a simple solution. When I’m asked to work with companies like this as a consultant, 99% of my job is to find a way to get the team to get started with a simple – but correct – solution.

Here was my prescription for this situation. I asked the team to consider creating what I call a sandbox for experimentation. The sandbox is an area of the product where the following rules are strictly enforced:

1. Any team can create a true split-test experiment that affects only the sandboxed parts of the product, however:
2. One team must see the whole experiment through end-to-end.
3. No experiment can run longer than a specified amount of time (usually a few weeks).
4. No experiment can affect more than a specified number of customers (usually expressed as a % of total).
5. Every experiment has to be evaluated based on a single standard report of 5-10 (no more) key metrics.
6. Any team that creates an experiment must monitor the metrics and customer reactions (support calls, forum threads, etc) while the experiment is in-progress, and abort if something catastrophic happens.

Putting a system like this in place is relatively easy; especially for any kind of online service. I advocate starting small; usually, the parts of the product that start inside the sandbox are low-effort, high-impact aspects like pricing, initial landing pages, or registration flows. These may not sound very exciting, but because they control the product’s positioning for new customers, they often allow minor changes to have a big impact.

Over time, additional parts of the product can be added to the sandbox, until eventually it becomes routine for the company to conduct these rigorous split-tests for even very large new features. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. The benefits of this approach are manifest immediately. Right from the beginning, the sandbox achieves three key goals simultaneously:

1. It forces teams to work cross-functionally. The first few changes, like a price change, may not require a lot of engineering effort. But they require coordination across departments – engineering, marketing, customers service. Teams that work this way are more productive, as long as productivity is measured by their ability to create customer value (and not just stay busy).
      
2. Everyone understands the results. True split-test experiments are easy to classify as successes or failures, because top-level metrics either move or they don’t. Either way, the team learns immediately whether their assumptions about how customers would behave were correct. By using the same metrics each time, the team builds literacy across the whole company about those key metrics.
    
3. It promotes rapid iteration. When people have a chance to see a project through end-to-end, and the work is done in small batches, and has a clear verdict delivered quickly, they benefit from the power of feedback. Each time they fail to move the numbers, they have a real opportunity for introspection. And, even more importantly, to act on their findings immediately. Thus, these teams tend to converge on optimal solutions rapidly, even if they start out with really bad ideas.

Putting it all together, let me illustrate with an example from another company. This team had been working for many months in a standard agile configuration: a disciplined engineering team taking direction from a product owner who would prioritize the features they should work on. The team was adept at responding to changes in direction from the product owner, and always delivered quality code.

But there was a problem. The team rarely received any feedback about whether the features they were building actually mattered to customers. Whatever learning took place was happening by the product owner; the rest of the team was just heads-down implementing features.

This led to a tremendous amount of waste, of the worst kind: building features nobody wants. We discovered this reality when the team started working inside a sandbox like the one I described above.

When new customers would try this product, they weren’t required to register at first. They could simply come to the website and start using it. Only after they started to have some success would the system prompt them to register – and after that, start to offer them premium features to pay with. It was a slick example of lazy registration and a freemium model. The underlying assumption was that making it seamless for customers to ease into the product was optimal. In order to support that assumption, the team had written a lot of very clever code to create this “tri-mode” experience (every part of the product had to treat guests, registered users and paying users somewhat differently).

One day, the team decided to put that assumption to the test. The experiment was easy to build (although hard to decide to do): simply remove the “guest” experience, and make everyone register right at the start.  To their surprise, the metrics didn’t move at all. Customers who were given the guest experience were not any more likely to register, and they were actually less likely to pay. In other words, all that tri-mode code was complete waste.

By discovering this unpleasant fact, the team had an opportunity to learn. They discovered, as is true of many freemium and lazy registration systems, that easy is not always optimal. When registration is too easy, customers can get confused about what they are registering for. (This is similar to the problem that viral loop companies have with the engagement loop: by making it too easy to join, they actually give away the positioning that allows for longer-term engagement.) More importantly, the experience led to some soul-searching. Why was a team this smart, this disciplined, and this committed to waste-free product development creating so much waste?

That’s the power of the sandbox approach.

Read More »

If you could have seen her, you would have thought she'd struck it rich. Ava bounded out of bed this morning, a morning she'd waited for an excruciating two days to arrive. The anticipation was just too much for her to take, which is why I typically don't tell her about things-- exciting things (like ice cream) and upsetting things (like shots) until they are imminent. Both because the anticipation is almost more than she can bare and because heaven forbid if plans should change. Even slightly.

But announcing these particular events were out of my control. They were preschool events...and ever since she learned about them at preschool on Tuesday, she's been asking, on the hour, "When will it be Thursday?" Well, today it was. These were the big events, in order:

1. School pictures
2. The firefighters came for a visit (and were going to let the kids, "climb all over their firetruck, mommy!".
3. Her day to "show and tell"

Many of you know how fascinated my daughter is with anything having to do with firefighters. Given her peculiar fear of smoke detectors, I wonder if she hasn't made a deal with them: I'll idolize firefighters and do whatever they tell me to do so long as you promise to never ever ever go off in my presence. We try to hold up their end of the bargain by a) changing the batteries twice per year; and b) cleaning our oven regularly so that when I do cook over 400 degrees, the drippings from the sweet potatoes don't smoke us out.

Usually when I ask her anything about preschool, what she did, what she learned, what she loved best, she replies, "I don't know." Then, later on, she'll usually give me dribs and drabs of details..."Ellie went home sick; the nurse told us to sing Happy Birthday while we wash our hands; I didn't get picked to be the line leader today..."

And today, even with so much to tell, her response wasn't any different. But here's what I did learn from her intermittently throughout the rest of the day:

She was a little nervous about the school pictures. "Why were you nervous?" I asked her.

"Because I didn't want the flash to go off in my eyes."

Ugh. I remember that flash. I mean, I had forgotten, but then I remembered. Then came the next detail:

"Did you have to sit in a chair?" I asked.

To which she replied, "Nope. I had to sit on a stool."

I completely forgot about THE stool. The school-picture-taking-stool! Whoa. What a flashback. Instantly, I was six years old with a home-job haircut, sitting on the stool that was so hard to sit on (and keep still!)

I also learned (through one of her imaginary play moments) that the firefighters must've told her that she had to wait for a second turn; that there were other children who hadn't had one yet. That kind of made me smile. She couldn't wait to get her little self all over that shiny red fire truck and she was going to try again and again and again to experience it. She's not going to let an opportunity go untapped; even if its thwarted, she's at least going to give it a try.

I was also pleased to hear that she asked where the lady firefighters were. I don't consider myself a feminist in the radical sense, but I must say, in this world, I'm psyched to have a daughter who only sees what she CAN do, not what only other people do. (Although I want her to be a firefighter about as much as I want to imagine the day she leaves home. In fact, her daddy has already made her, at three years old, SIGN an agreement that states: I will let my daddy come to college with me and sleep on my floor all the days I'm there.)

And then, there's show and tell. Ironically, she had planned three weeks ago to bring in her fire hat and her firey red dancin' shoes for the occasion. I guess the stars were aligned with the firefighters coming for a visit and all.

Now, as I write, she's upstairs getting a story and a song (or two, or three). Probably asking her daddy questions like, "What dangerous things did you do as a little boy?" and, "Why were the firefighter's hats yellow today?"

And when I go to bed, I'll remember how excited Ava was when she woke up in the morning. How in love with the day she was before she even knew what it would bring. She did strike it rich. She strikes it rich every single day.

I think she's onto somethin'.
Read More »

I've been trying very hard to avoid turning this blog into a travelogue. Normally, I try to make my post-event writeups more than just a transcript, by including reactions and comments. On this speaking tour, that's been simply impossible, so I've decided to let the following collection of videos, podcasts, and slides batch up for a little while. If you're interested in more real-time updates during my speaking tour, please tune into my twitter feed.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy all this multimedia content. In addition to some of my recent talks, you can learn more about the Startup Visa movement and enjoy two really interesting lean startup case studies.

My Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar courtesy of Stanford Ecorner (audio podcast only for now, video coming soon):

if you'd like to follow along with slides, they are here:

2009 09 29 The Lean Startup At Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar

View more presentations from Eric Ries.

From high atop the BT Tower in London, this brief BT Tradespace interview:


Why do we need a Startup Visa? A Tale of 2 Erics:


Also in London, I took up a lot of airtime during day two of Seedcamp. You can read highlights on their blog, or watch this short video:


Seedcamp - Day 2 Highlights from Seedcamp on Vimeo.


Or watch my full #leanstartup presentation at Seedcamp in London:


And two bonus videos that are well worth watching (weally):

Timothy Fitz, who worked for me at IMVU, giving an in-depth presentation on the details of the continuous deployment system that we built there.


With accompanying slides:

Continuous Deployment

View more presentations from TimothyFitz.

pbWorks (formerly pbWiki) was one of the first companies that ever invited me to join their advisory board. I like to think that had some small part in causing their subsequent success. Judge for yourself by watching David Weekly's #leanstartup case study (pbWorks):


Thanks to everyone who has helped plan, organize, record and attend these many events!
Read More »

Beware! I have detected a secret virus in your CPU. Due to an interaction effect between your hardware, solar flares, and quantum flux, this virus will crash your computer and erase your hard drive sometime soon. There is only one way to prevent disaster: you must click the subscribe button over on the right there. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Did you do it? Good. Now you’re safe from that dastardly virus. How do you know my solution worked? Just wait. See, no crashing. You should really say thank you.

Now, I know some of you didn’t believe my urgent virus warning, and therefore didn’t take my proposed solution. But you’re not safe. That virus is still out there, lurking. It could strike at any minute. And when your computer eventually crashes, you should feel bad that you didn’t listen to me.

OK, I admit it. There is no virus. I did my best to exaggerate this claim without saying anything disprovable, in order to illustrate the curse of prevention. Imagine for a moment that you believed my claim about the dangerous virus. After investing in my proposed solution, you probably would be grateful that I “prevented” the problem from happening. In an example this ludicrous, that hopefully sounds funny. But companies make this mistake repeatedly.

Let’s take a common real-world example. It’s important to invest in good architecture so that your website will scale once customers arrive. If you make that investment, and then customers arrive, and the site stays up, most companies will reward the people who built the architecture and, thus, prevented the scaling problems. That’s every bit as crazy as the bogus claim I made earlier. How do you know the problem was actually prevented? Isn’t it just as possible that it never would have occurred in the first place? Or, if it really was prevented, what was the opportunity cost of choosing to prevent it ahead of time?

In other words, there is a formula for evaluating the success of any proposed prevention:

IF

cost of prevention < (probability of problem occurring) * (cost of problem)

THEN

do it

ELSE

ignore it

The killer thing about this formula is that every single term in it is unknown. And in most situations, there is significant cost involved in negotiating over the right estimates to plug in.

I have been present for these kinds of negotiations many times in my career. They are usually among the most heated arguments a company has. Like other situations that I’ve written about, they tend to devolve into competing all-or-nothing camps. One side insists that we should build things the right way, and that failure to anticipate problems is an abdication of responsibility. But the other side wants to get things done, and doing things right somehow, always, every time seems to involve postponing useful work. Both sides suspect that deep down, secretly, the other side is using their arguments over architecture (or planning, or roadmaps, or specifications) to advance a secret agenda. Ever notice how people’s pet projects seem to be exempt?

Why do they harbor that paranoia? It’s easy to see. Say you want to derail someone else’s project. Just start enumerating corner cases. Imagine everything that might go wrong, and insist that those things be prevented before the project is launched. It’s a win-win: you either dramatically increase the proposed cost of the project, making it easier to get cancelled, or you can rely on some “I-told-you-so’s” when the project does launch and encounters inevitable problems, which gives you credibility in future such arguments. On the other side, if you want a project to go forward, you can suddenly "discover" all kinds of extra efficiencies that make this particular project an especially good deal. In the past, we invested in brilliant architecture, code reuse, refactoring, modular design, etc. that now makes it a simple matter to add this feature without much risk of corner cases. Right.

Managing these situations is hard for any company, but potentially lethal for a startup. There are just so many ways for a startup to fail. I’ve lived through the over-architecture failure – where attempting to prevent all kinds of problems wound up delaying the company from putting out any product at all. And I’ve seen companies fail the other way – the so-called Friendster effect: having a high-profile technical failure just when customer adoption is going wild.

Most of the advice I’ve heard on this topic has been a kind of split-the-difference approach. The theory is that there is some truth in both camps, and the right way to manage the disagreement is to sprinkle a little bit of both into our plans. A little planning, but not too much. Prevent some corner cases, but not others. The problem with this advice, as I’ve experienced it, is that it’s pretty hard to give a rationale for why we should anticipate this problem but ignore another one. To the people being managed that way, it feels like the boss is being capricious or arbitrary. And that feeds the conspiracy feeling that decisions have an ulterior motive.

So I’d like to lay out a systematic way to avoid death-by-corner-case without sacrificing the company’s ability to grow. In other words, a principled way to combine agility with stability.

The first shift required is a change in orientation from prevention to fast response. Many problems are catastrophic only if allowed to fester. Imagine you hear from an engineer that they are worried that a certain payment subsystem is unreliable, and will therefore double-charge some customers. One way to evaluate this fear is to spend time on analysis: how many customers will be affected? What is the maximum amount of overcharging that will happen? How upset will those customers be? How much will it cost to solve this problem now? In this framework, we’ll tend to either invest in the proposed prevention or do nothing.

But there is another way. Imagine we asked the following question: if this problem does materialize in the future, how will we know? In a lot of systems, it might take days or weeks to uncover a problem-in-action. Maybe we already have a mechanism for customers to report this kind of problem, or maybe we could invest in a simple alert counter that increments whenever the problem happens, and sends a notification if it happens often. Then, we’d know immediately if the problem ever manifests, and get a simultaneous report on its severity.

We can also ask: how would we fix the problem if it does occur? If we’re practicing continuous deployment, we can be confident that we’ll be able to rush an emergency fix into production without risking introducing further problems. If not, maybe an investment in that direction would be more warranted. In other words, you can always invest in process, batch size reduction, and agility as an alternative to preventing a specific problem.

There are two principal reasons why this second approach is better. The first is that it allows us to make variable-sized investments in response to a feared corner case. Instead of “do the fix” or “hack it up” we can choose increments of investment anywhere in-between. That gives teams a lot more flexibility in the face of the numerous corner cases that come up. Second, investing in fast response is a more resilient strategy. If we’re wrong about the corner case, the investments we’ve made in fast response will allow us to respond faster to whatever problems do appear. By contrast, most investments in traditional prevention are designed to anticipate and fix a specific problem.

But investing in fast response doesn’t solve the whole problem. That’s because there’s still a lot of judgment involved in choosing the right level of investment to make in any given case. It can feel  incongruous to people who are used to the traditional model because it has a built in paradox: you will encounter a lot of cases where you know a problem exists, and you know how to solve that problem, and you are investing time related to that problem but are not investing in the solution. To a lot of smart engineers, that sounds crazy.

That’s why it’s essential to pair the fast response aspect of this approach with a disciplined commitment to root cause analysis. Regular readers of this blog will know the specific methodology I recommend, called Five Whys. But regardless of the technique you use, it’s essential that you get regular feedback about how your prevention decisions are turning out in practice. When you’re heavily investing in prevention, you need to evaluate whether that’s causing your team to go faster. If it’s not, then you’re investing too much in one-off solutions and not enough in process. And if you’re having a lot of problems, you need to have a mechanism for ramping up your investment in prevention to avoid having your whole team dragged down into firefighting. Systems like Five Whys create a natural feedback loop: when you're going too fast, causing a lot of new problems, it slows you down to invest in prevention. As those preventative efforts pay off, the team naturally speeds up.

The most dangerous situation you can find yourself in is investing in prevention and also firefighting all the time. That’s why there is a third essential component to this approach. You need to have a long-term vision of where you’re headed. That’s because not all investments are created equal. In most real-world situations, any particular problem (or proposed problem) will have multiple kinds of solutions that you could invest in. Take your typical scalability bottleneck. It could be fixed by refactoring the code itself, or by partitioning the data horizontally or vertically, or by adding additional capacity at the point of the bottleneck, or by shaping end-user demand, or even by removing the feature itself. At any given point in time, which is the right solution? Here’s my belief: the right solution is always the one that moves you closest to your vision while simultaneously solving the problem. Thus it is unacceptable to choose a solution that solves the problem but makes not progress towards the end-state, just as it is unacceptable to invest in a solution that builds a beautiful vision but doesn’t solve today’s problem. Finding such a solution is sometimes challenging, but that’s the moment when it really pays to spend some time thinking through alternative approaches. In my experience, where there is a will to find a synthesis solution, there is always a way.

Read More »

Suatu pagi di tahun 2006.

Salam
Umair, kenapa kau senyap je sekarang? Lama betul tak sms aku? Kau ade problem ke?

Sebuah sms tiba-tiba menerjah masuk ke inbox. Sesaat aku terdiam memikirkannya. Terjemahan Al-Quran yang sedang dibaca, diletakkan ke tepi. Lalu jemariku mula menekan-nekan papan kekunci handphone 3310 ku.

Salam,

Takde la. Biasa je. Sibuk dengan SPM yang dah nak dekat kut.

Ye la nk SPM pn, takkanla sampai senyap macam ni. Pelik aku tengok ko sekarang, dah tak mesra macam dulu.

Alamak, macam mana la aku nak terang kat minah sorang ni. Ya Allah, bantulah aku menyampaikannya.

Alah, biasa je. Prasaan ko je kut. Em, ko tau aku clash kn?

Ade gak dengar. Tapi kau tak cakap apa-apa pun. Aku diam je la. Selalu kan kau cerita semua masalah kat aku. Kata kawan.

'Memang kau kawan aku. Tapi kau perempuan. Aku lelaki. Aku tak senang nak luahkan perasaan kat kau.' Kata-kata tu hanya terlintas di dalam hati.

Erm, kau tau kenapa aku clash kan..?

Tau. Kau clash sebab couple tu haram kan? Tapi takkanla sampai kawan dengan aku pun jadi haram jugak?

Alamak, nada dia ni dah lain macam.

Bukanla macam tu. Boleh je kawan. Kalau ada masalah study, leh je bincang. Nak tanya pendapat ke, leh je sms. Cuma aku takde la nak sms saje-saje. Gurau-gurau macam dulu.

Ye la. Macam tu sama je macam tak berkawan. Ape-ape la. Suka hati kau. Hilanglah seorang kawan..~~ ok..

Salam..

Ika, aku tak bermaksud macam tu.

Tiada lagi mesej yang hadir.

Aku menarik nafas dalam-dalam.

Aduh..macam mana ni. Berat betul rasa hati ni. Ya Allah, aku tidak mahu menyakiti hati hamba-hambaMu namun aku khuatir andai aku tidak mampu menjaga hatiku. Ya Allah, Engkau Maha Mengetahu bahawa kelemahanku adalah wanita. Aku tidak kuat menghadapi mereka. Berbicara dengan mereka sahaja menyebabkan hatiku berbunga-bunga. Dan aku tahu itu merupakan sebagian daripada zina. Sedangkan hati juga boleh berzina.

“Nasib anak Adam mengenai zina telah ditetapkan. Tidak mustahil dia pernah melakukannya. Dua mata, zinanya memandang. Dua telinga, zinanya mendengar. Lidah, zinanya berkata. Tangan, zinanya memukul. Kaki, zinanya melangkah. Hati, zinanya ingin dan rindu, sedangkan faraj (kemaluan) hanya mengikuti atau tidak mengikuti.”

[Sahih Muslim, hadith ke 2282.]

Aku malu Ya-Allah. Apabila berbicara denganMu ketika solat, hatiku tidak berbunga seperti itu. Ketika berdoa kepadaMu, hatiku tidak sebahagia ketika aku ber'SMS' dengan kekasihku dahulu. Malah di setiap saat dan ketika aku lebih banyak mengingati kekasihku daripadaMu. Sedangkan Engkau telah berfirman :

Hai orang-orang yang beriman, janganlah harta-hartamu dan anak-anakmu melalaikan kamu dari mengingat Allah. Barang siapa yang membuat demikian maka mereka itulah orang-orang yang rugi.

[63:9]

Ampuni aku Ya-Allah...

"Umair, kenapa kau termenung je ni?" Tanya Zulhakimi.

Aku memandang kepadanya. Masih terdiam.

Dia ni pengerusi Badan Dakwah dan Kerohanian (BDK) sekolah aku. Dulu dia ni antara orang yang aku cukup anti. Asyik-asyik ajak orang turun subuh, baca ma'thurat, tegur itu ini. Ramai juga yang tak suka dengan dia sebenarnya. Tapi sekarang dah jadi antara kawan-kawan yang selalu berbual dengan aku. Dan aku pun dah mula jadi macam dia. Tegur-tegur orang. Bagi tazkirah. Sampai kawan-kawan semua pun ramai yang pelik tengok aku. Siap yang anti aku pun dah ada. Sedangkan memberi peringatan itukan perintah Allah,

Dan tetaplah memberi peringatan, karena sesungguhnya peringatan itu bermanfaat bagi orang-orang yang beriman.
[51:55]

Dan kalau aku tak mengingatkan, nanti aku akan dipertanggungjawabkan:

Dan (ingatlah) ketika suatu umat di antara mereka berkata: "Mengapa kamu menasihati kaum yang Allah akan membinasakan mereka atau mengazab mereka dengan azab yang amat keras?" Mereka menjawab: "Agar kami mempunyai alasan (pelepas tanggung jawab) kepada Tuhanmu, dan supaya mereka bertakwa".

[7:164]

Mengapa mereka sebegitu sekali memusuhiku?

Aku dah berubah. Ya. Aku memang dah banyak berubah. Sejak dengar ceramah motivasi Kem PureBase Training Center untuk program kecemerlangan SPM SMAPL 2006 tu, aku memang betul-betul merasakan diri perlu berubah.

*****

Penceramah itu seorang doktor perubatan biasa, namun ceramahnya penuh dengan ayat Al-Quran dan hadith. Seolah-olah dia menghafal Al-Quran! Yang membuatkan aku amat tertarik, dia menyatakan dengan spesifik di mana ayat Al-Quran itu terletak di dalam Al-Quran. Gayanya tidak ubah seperti Dr. Zakir Naik yang amat aku kagumi.

Aku amat terkesan dengan kata-katanya,

"Sekarang ni umat Islam amat jauh daripada Al-Quran. Dan ini memang strategi orang kafir. Mereka menjauhkan umat Islam daripada Al-Quran. Tahu apa yang jadi pada orang-orang yang tidak menjadikan Al-Quran sebagai panduan? Syaitan akan menjadi teman karibnya. Ni bukan saya yang kata, Allah yang kata. Lihat dalam surah Az-Zukhruf, Surah ke-43, ayat ke-36. Hah, kamu, tolong bacakan."

Tiba-tiba dia point kat aku.


Aku pun baca lah,
Barang siapa yang berpaling dari pengajaran Tuhan Yang Maha Pemurah (Al Qur'an), Kami adakan baginya setan (yang menyesatkan) maka setan itulah yang menjadi teman yang selalu menyertainya.
[43:36]

'Ya Allah, lama aku tak jadikan Al-Quran sebagai teman. Adakah sebab tu aku banyak betul buat maksiat?' Detik hatiku.

Doktor itu menyambung,

"Sebenarnya ramai orang yang ada sekarang ni pandai ilmu agama. Ramai yang sekolah agama. Ramai yang dah tahu halal haram. Tapi kenapa mereka masih bermaksiat? Kenapa kemungkaran masih bermaharajalela? Kerana tiada Da'i yang muncul untuk memberi peringatan. Semuanya takut untuk bersuara. Tiada yang kemudiannya bersungguh-sungguh untuk mentarbiyah ummat yang kita semakin rosak. Bila kita terus ikut hawa nafsu, dan menjadikannya tuhan, maka Allah akan membiarkan kita sesat. Cuba kita sama-sama hayati surah Aj-Jatsiah, surah ke-45, ayat ke-23."

Alif yang berada di sebelahku membacakannya:

Maka pernahkah kamu melihat orang yang menjadikan hawa nafsunya sebagai tuhannya, dan Allah membiarkannya sesat berdasarkan ilmu-Nya dan Allah telah mengunci mati pendengaran dan hatinya dan meletakkan tutupan atas penglihatannya? Maka siapakah yang akan memberinya petunjuk sesudah Allah (membiarkannya sesat). Maka mengapa kamu tidak mengambil pelajaran?

[45:23]

Entah kenapa ayat itu amat-amat menusuk ke dalam hatiku. Tiba-tiba mataku berair. Aku amat terkesima. Aku terbayang segala dosa-dosa yang aku dengan sesuka hati melakukannya. Mataku, apa yang telah aku lihat dengannya. Tanganku, untuk apa telah aku gunakan ia. Telingaku, apa yang telah aku dengar dengannya. Dan yang paling aku takuti, apakah aku akan disesatkan? Kerana bermaksiat kepadaNya dalam keadaan sedar. Sengaja memilih untuk bermaksiat? Astaghfirullah...mataku terus berair. Tanganku terus melaju mencatat ayat-ayat yang dibacakannya.

Selesai ceramahnya, aku mendekatinya.

"Doktor, tadi doktor kata, Allah akan sesatkan mereka yang menjadikan hawa nafsu sebagai tuhan. Saya dah cuba menguasai diri, tapi selalu juga melakukan maksiat. Adakah Allah akan menyesatkan saya?"

Mataku semakin membanjir. Entah kenapa begitu lunak sekali hatiku ketika itu. Sambil memegang bahuku, dia berkata,

"Akh, orang bertaqwa tu bukannya orang yang tidak pernah melakukan dosa, tetapi dia adalah orang yang apabila melakukan dosa, dia melihat kesalahannya dan tidak mengulanginya lagi. Lihat ayat ni:

Dan bersegeralah kamu kepada ampunan dari Tuhanmu dan kepada surga yang luasnya seluas langit dan bumi yang disediakan untuk orang-orang yang bertakwa,

(yaitu) orang-orang yang menafkahkan (hartanya), baik di waktu lapang maupun sempit, dan orang-orang yang menahan amarahnya dan memaafkan (kesalahan) orang. Allah menyukai orang-orang yang berbuat kebajikan.

Dan (juga) orang-orang yang apabila mengerjakan perbuatan keji atau menganiaya diri sendiri, mereka ingat akan Allah, lalu memohon ampun terhadap dosa-dosa mereka dan siapa lagi yang dapat mengampuni dosa selain daripada Allah? Dan mereka tidak meneruskan perbuatan kejinya itu, sedang mereka mengetahui.

[3:133-135]

Maksudnya, mereka ni buat dosa tak? Buat kan? Tapi bila tersedar, mereka beristighfar, minta ampun daripada Allah dan tidak mengulanginya lagi.

"Saya menyesal, tapi selalu buat lagi."

"Akhi, kita kena berusaha meninggalkan maksiat yang kita lakukan. Setiap kali terfikir mengenainya, beristighfar, kan Allah kata dia akan menambahkan kekuatan kita apabila kita beristighfar? Tengok ayat ni:

Dan (dia berkata): "Hai kaumku, mohonlah ampun kepada Tuhanmu lalu bertobatlah kepada-Nya, niscaya Dia menurunkan hujan yang sangat deras atasmu, dan Dia akan menambahkan kekuatan kepada kekuatanmu, dan janganlah kamu berpaling dengan berbuat dosa."

[11:52]
Jadi banyak-banyak beristighfar, insya-Allah nta akan mampu meninggalkan maksiat itu."

Aku terus menangis teresak-esak. Perasaan sedih, bahagia dan terharu bercampur-baur menjadi satu.Sedih, mengenangkan dosa yang dilakukan. Bahagia, kerana terlihat sedikit sinar di hujung laluan. Terharu, kerana masih ada manusia yang seperti doktor ini. Aku terus menangis tanpa menghiraukan puluhan mata yang memandang ke arahku. Di saat itu aku berazam untuk meninggalkan segala kemaksiatan yang masih kulakukan.

*****

Mataku tiba-tiba berair. Setiap kali mengenang peristiwa bersejarah itu pasti mataku akan berair. Hati bertahmid syukur kerana Allah memberi peluang untukku menyedari kesilapan dan meninggalkan maksiat yang kulakukan.

"Umair, kenapa kau menangis? Ada masalah ke? Ceritalah kat aku." Dia kembali bertanya. Semakin pelik dengan diriku yang tiba-tiba menangis.

"Takde la. Aku tengah fikir sesuatu. Susah betul nak berubah ni kan."

"Nak cari redha Allah memang susah. Banyak benda yang kita kena tinggalkan. Kan hadith sahih yang diriwayatkan oleh  Bukhari tu jelas. 'Dihiasi syurga itu dengan perkara-perkara yang dibenci. Dan dihiasi neraka itu dengan syahwat.' Dan memang banyak benda yang manusia suka tu adalah syahwat. Dan itu memang kita kena cuba jauhi."

"Betul cakap kau Kimi. Terima kasih kerana mengingatkan."

Zulhakimi tersenyum. Wajahnya begitu menenangkan. Agaknya inilah wajah orang yang dekat dengan Allah. Bersih, bercahaya lagi membahagiakan orang yang manatapnya. 'Ya Allah, kurniakan aku wajah yang bercahaya sepertinya.' Bisikku di dalam hati.

Fikiran tiba-tiba melayang ke peristiwa di dalam kelas tempoh hari.

*****

Aku  membuka loker buku di belakang, ada sekeping nota.

'Assalamu'alaikum. Lama betul tak dapat nota daripada awak. Kenapa, senyap je. Nota last saya awak tak reply pun?'

Aku dan Min ketika itu masih membahasakan diri dengan 'saya-awak'. Kami tidak kelihatan lebih daripada sekadar kawan biasa. Di dalam kelas tidak pernah bertegur sapa. Namun secara 'underground', kami sangat kerap berhubung. Aku yang memulakan tradisi ini. Aku menyelitkan nota kecil di dalam lokernya. Aku memulakan langkah untuk mendekatinya kerana ingin memenangi hatinya.

= = = = = = = = =

Assalamu'alaikum, saya ni tuan loker atas awak. Nak berkawan boleh?

Itulah kali pertama aku menghantar nota kepada seorang perempuan. Jantung aku amat berdebar-debar ketika itu. Macam nak tercabut pun ada. Mulanya aku dah nak kecewa sebab tiada reply keesokkan harinya.

Setiap kali ke loker aku berdebar-debar untuk membukanya. 'Dia dah reply belum ni?' Tetapi sehari sebelum cuti pertengahan tahun, tiba-tiba..

Wa'alaikumussalam. Boleh je. Kenapa, sebelum ni kita bukan kawan ke? Sorry tak reply sebelum ni. Nanti cuti kalau ada masa hantarlah email kat saya. Ni email saya:

si_gadis_itu@yahoo.com

Awak balik naik bas ke? Balik baik-baik ye. Selamat bercuti.

- MIN-

Dia reply! Wah..tak tergambar kegembiraan aku masa tu. Berbunga-bunga habis hati.Sejak itu kami sering berbalas-balas nota.

Namun akhirnya kami hanya berakhir sebagai kawan. namun hatiku tetap berbunga-bunga setiap kali mendapat nota-nota daripadanya.

= = = = = = = = =

Nampaknya tindakkan aku mendiamkan diri tidak berjaya menyampaikan mesej yang jelas.

Wa'alaikumussalam.
Saya tak reply sebab macam rasa tak perlu pun. Tak penting pun kan? Lagipun susah nak jaga hati bila berinteraksi dengan awak. Awak pun tahu macam mana perasaan saya terhadap awak dulu kan. Sejak clash aritu saya dah banyak berubah. Maaflah, saya dah berubah. Saya bukan Umair yang dulu lagi. Kita masih kawan, tetapi takla macam dulu lagi. Nak mintak saya ajar addmath mungkin boleh la. Tapi baik awak mintak tolong Ain. Dia lagi pandai kan? Bukan ape, saya rasa dia lagi layak ajar awak. Dia perempuan, awak perempuan. Saya lelaki. Dalam Islam, lelaki dan perempuan sepatutnya tidak berinteraksi tanpa tujuan yang jelas. Sepatutnya kita yang belajar di Sekolah Menengah AGAMA Persekutuan ni amat memahami situasi ni. Jadi saya harap, kalau bukan ada apa-apa hal yang penting, tak perlulah awak hubungi saya ya. Maafkan saya andai selama ini ada tersilap kata atau tersalah bahasa.

Seorang kawan,

-UMAIR-

Keesokkannya dia hanya membalas dengan nota yang cukup pendek,

Ok. Saya faham. Lepas ni saya tak hubungi awak lagi. Ni nota terakhir.
Hilanglah seorang kawan...
Assalamualaikum.

-MIN-

*****

Beratnya hati menghadapi segala situasi ini. Meninggalkan sesuatu yang sudah mendarah daging di dalam jiwa merupakan sesuatu yang amat perit. Umpama hati ditoreh-toreh oleh pisau belati. Memang bahaya apabila dunia diletakkan di dalam hati. Kerana itu, biarlah ia hanya di tangan. Agar mudah kita mengurusnya.

Teringat kata-kata Al-Ghazali:
Jangan resah andai ada yang membencimu, kerana masih ramai yang mencintaimu di dunia. Tetapi resahlah andai Allah membencimu, kerana tiada lagi yang mencintaimu di akhirat.

Ya Allah, bantulah aku untuk terus berubah mencari redhaMu. Tiada yang lebih indah daripada mendapat redhaMu. Seindah apapun kenikmatan dunia, jika Engkau tidak meredhainya, tentulah ia hanyalah sia-sia. Ya Allah, biarlah seluruh dunia membenciku, tetapi Engkau mencintaiku Ya Allah..

Maafkan aku wahai kawan-kawanku...tidak pernah terniat untuk menyakiti hati kalian. Tujuanku hanya mencari redha Allah. Kalian tetap adalah kawan-kawanku yang kucintai, sebagai muslim. Semoga kalian dibimbing oleh Allah ke jalan yang benar. Mohon doakan untuk diri ini juga.

-umairzulkefli-

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