Mohammad Mousavi

There are people we meet at the right moment in life who change much more than what we know. Sometimes they teach us a skill. Sometimes they believe in us before we have much reason to believe in ourselves. And sometimes, the best mentors do something even more difficult: they refuse to give us the answer. They leave enough space for us to struggle, question, make mistakes, and eventually understand something for ourselves.

For Mohammad Mousavi, that person was Mansour Ehsani Zonouz. When Mohammad came to him with questions about coffee, Mansour rarely answered them directly. He would ask another question, give him a small clue, or point him somewhere and let him figure out the rest. Mohammad describes it simply:

“He didn’t give me the fish. He taught me how to fish.”

Mansour helped him understand coffee, of course, but what stayed with Mohammad was something bigger. He was learning how to think, how to stay curious, and how to find an answer when nobody was standing beside him to provide one.

Mentorship can be contagious. Someone gives you their time when you have very little to offer them in return. Years pass. You grow. Then one day, almost without noticing it, you find yourself doing the same thing for someone else. Today, Mohammad trains young coffee professionals, leads a coffee team, and says one of his favorite moments is watching a student move from “I know this” to “I understand this.” He doesn’t want people simply to memorize what to do. He wants them to understand why they are doing it. In many ways, Mansour’s way of teaching never stopped with Mohammad. It simply found another person to travel through.

But before Mohammad could mentor anyone, before the competitions, roasting, judging, training, or moving to another country, there was an eighteen-year-old who desperately wanted to make coffee. The funny thing was, the café where he worked wouldn’t even let him behind the bar.

The Kid on the Wrong Side of the Bar

That café was already special to Mohammad before it became his workplace. The smell of Dream Catcher incense met people at the door. Italian jazz played in the background. Late at night, after the last guests had left, the owner would sometimes take an accordion down from the wall and play while everyone cleaned. Mohammad and his classmates used to meet there and order what they called “French coffee” with a shot of milk. He knew almost nothing about coffee at the time. He simply loved being there.

After high school, Mohammad needed a job. He wanted to become financially independent and save money for university, so when his favorite café advertised a position, he applied. He got the job, serving customers, washing dishes, cleaning, and doing whatever needed to be done. There was only one problem: the place he really wanted to be was behind the bar, and they wouldn’t let him work there. He wanted to understand what was happening on the other side, but for the moment, all he could do was watch.

That unfinished curiosity stayed with him after he left. For about a year, Mohammad managed a local bookstore, a job he enjoyed enough that he even imagined opening a book café someday. He also enrolled at university to study psychology. Coffee could easily have become nothing more than the memory of his first job, but while Mohammad and some classmates were taking a group of children from a charity out for dinner, he happened to meet a café manager. Mohammad asked whether they needed someone behind the bar. The next day, he started as a barista assistant.

This time, he could finally touch the coffee. The café was beginning to explore specialty coffee and filter brewing, something still relatively new in his city at the time. Mohammad remembers watching a barista prepare filter coffee with incredible concentration: weighing the coffee, measuring the water, and paying attention to movements he had never considered important. Then he smelled the coffee. It was floral and fruity, almost like walking into a garden full of flowers and suddenly discovering fruit growing somewhere among them.

What followed was not an immediate dream of becoming a famous barista. The more Mohammad learned, the more questions appeared. That curiosity would eventually take him much further than he could have imagined, but at the beginning, he was simply a university student trying to understand what was happening inside a cup.

Why Not Me?

During his university years, Mohammad spent around eight hours a day studying psychology and another eight working in coffee. He moved through different cafés, learned from the people around him, and gradually took on more responsibility. Eventually, he became a Head Barista. Somewhere along that journey, he met Mansour.

Mansour didn’t appear with a grand plan for Mohammad’s career. He simply became someone Mohammad could learn beside. He challenged him instead of making things easy, and when Mohammad became interested in competing, Mansour was there again. Mohammad had seen what high-level coffee competition could look like, and then one day he came across a poster for a barista competition. His reaction was wonderfully simple:

“Why not me?”

So he registered, even though he was far from perfectly prepared. He had no sponsor and no complete set of competition equipment. He borrowed some things, took what he could use from the café, and bought whatever else he could afford. Mansour helped him choose his competition coffee and roasted it for him. Mohammad would finish his regular shift, wait until everyone had gone home, and then start practicing. There was no audience or applause, just him trying the routine again and again.

When he traveled to the competition, he saw other competitors arriving with teams and much more equipment. Mohammad had his café manager there to support him, but otherwise he had very little. For a moment, he wondered whether he really belonged there. Then he stepped onto the stage with what he had. Mohammad finished second, but years later, second place is not the part he remembers most. He remembers Mansour being happy and proud. Someone had invested time in him without expecting anything in return, and that moment felt like a small way of returning some of the trust Mansour had placed in him.

Passing It On

After that competition, Mohammad began thinking more about how much of what he knew had actually come from other people. Mansour had shared his time without asking for anything back. Other baristas had answered Mohammad’s endless questions when he was new. Managers had trusted him with opportunities before he had years of experience to prove himself. His journey was built from his own effort, but it was also built from many small acts of generosity.

So Mohammad started teaching. At first, it was about coffee skills. But he soon realized that telling someone the correct grind setting or brewing recipe was the easy part. He wanted people to understand why. What happens when this variable changes? Why does temperature matter? What are you actually tasting? What could you change next? Sometimes, while teaching, he could see the exact moment when separate pieces suddenly connected in someone’s mind.

“That moment when ‘I know this’ becomes ‘I understand this’ is probably my favorite part.”

Perhaps this is how mentorship really spreads. Someone gives you more than an answer. They give you patience, trust, confidence, or a way of thinking. Years later, you find yourself giving the same thing to somebody else, sometimes without even realizing where it originally came from. Mohammad had once needed Mansour beside him. Eventually, other people began needing Mohammad beside them.

Psychology, the subject Mohammad once thought he might have to choose instead of coffee, also quietly found its way back into his life. Leading a team taught him that being good at coffee and being good with people were completely different skills. Coffee variables can be adjusted and measured; people cannot. Different people respond to different motivations. Some need direction, others need space. Sometimes leadership means teaching, and sometimes it means listening. Mohammad made mistakes learning this, and he doesn’t pretend otherwise. Over time, however, his idea of leadership became less about being the most knowledgeable person in the room and more about creating an environment where other people could learn and grow.

In that sense, what Mansour gave Mohammad was never really just coffee knowledge. It was a way of helping another person become independent. And that may be one of the most valuable things a mentor can do. The goal is not to make someone need you forever. It is to help them reach a point where they can continue without you, and perhaps one day become that person for somebody else.

Starting Again

There is another kind of learning that no coffee mentor can completely prepare you for: leaving home. The situation in Mohammad’s home country, Iran, made him think seriously about his future. He had registered for a master’s degree, but deep down, he knew he was looking for another path. His decision to migrate was not originally about finding a better coffee job. He was looking for a new beginning, without knowing exactly what that beginning would look like.

Millions of people know some version of this decision. We migrate for different reasons. Sometimes it is survival. Sometimes opportunity. Sometimes family, safety, work, or a dream that seems impossible where we are. Often, it is several of these things mixed together. From the outside, we can reduce someone’s migration to a simple sentence: He moved from Iran to Oman. But for the person actually leaving, that sentence can contain a family, friends, familiar streets, routines, memories, language, and a version of yourself that belongs to that place.

Leaving was especially difficult for Mohammad because his family was one of the most important parts of his life. He had very little time to say goodbye and left without properly saying goodbye to many of the people who had shaped those years. There was excitement about whatever might come next, but leaving home was not a romantic adventure. It meant accepting that the life waiting for him might look nothing like the one he knew.

Then, almost at the same time Mohammad was searching for a way forward, a friend living outside Iran heard about his plans and told him about a job in Oman. A newly opened roastery needed a roasting manager. Suddenly, the coffee journey he had spent years building and the new life he was searching for met at the same point. He took the opportunity.

Oman meant starting again. There was homesickness, financial pressure, a new workplace, distance from family, and all the ordinary difficulties of trying to build a life somewhere that did not yet feel like home. But there was also something Mohammad hadn’t always had before: access. He found educational resources and professional opportunities that had been difficult for him to reach at home. He saved money, reduced other expenses, studied, tasted, learned, and gradually took on more responsibility.

Today, Mohammad works as Head of Coffee, responsible for the journey from green coffee and roast profiles through quality control and what eventually reaches the customer. He is also an authorized coffee trainer, sharing what he has learned with others. The eighteen-year-old who once stood outside the bar hoping someone would give him a chance had crossed a border, rebuilt his life, and become someone whose work now includes creating chances for other people.

There is something strangely similar between Mohammad’s first competition and his migration. In neither situation did he begin with everything he wanted. There was uncertainty in both, and there was no guarantee about where either decision would lead. Sometimes we begin with borrowed equipment. Sometimes we begin with a suitcase. We work with what we have, accept help from the people willing to give it, and take the next step.

Back Behind the Bar

More than a decade has passed since an eighteen-year-old walked into his favorite café because he needed a job. Since then, Mohammad has served customers, washed dishes, made coffee, led teams, competed with borrowed equipment, trained baristas, roasted coffee, worked in quality control, judged competitions, left his country, built another life, married, and become a mentor to other coffee professionals. Those things describe his career, but perhaps they do not explain the most important part of his journey.

His story is also about what people leave in one another. A barista answers a beginner’s question. A manager gives someone an opportunity. A mentor refuses to give the easy answer because he believes the person asking is capable of finding it. Someone lends a piece of equipment. Someone travels with you to a competition. None of these actions may seem particularly important at the time, but together they can change the direction of another person’s life.

Mansour could not have known exactly where Mohammad would end up when he started mentoring him. He probably could not have known how many other people Mohammad would eventually teach. That may be the beautiful thing about mentorship: its impact does not necessarily stop with the person standing in front of you. What you give someone can continue traveling long after they no longer need your help.

Every Friday, he goes back behind the bar. He works beside the baristas, calibrates and tastes with them, serves customers, listens to feedback, and stays connected to the place where his own curiosity began. At eighteen, Mohammad stood on the other side of a café bar wondering what was happening behind it. He wanted someone to let him in. Eventually, someone did. Later, Mansour taught him how to think rather than simply what to think. When life took him away from Iran, he carried those lessons into another country and another beginning.

Today, somewhere around him, there may be another young coffee person asking too many questions, without limited equipment, without a clear career plan, and perhaps without much confidence that they belong. Mohammad knows that person well because he used to be that person.

And perhaps this is one of the quietest ways our coffee community grows. Not only through champions, famous names, certificates, or people standing on big stages, but through knowledge and kindness moving from one person to another. Someone believes in us, challenges us, answers a question, or opens a door. Then years later, when we finally find ourselves on the other side of that door, we have a choice.

We can hold it open for someone else. Mansour did that for Mohammad. Mohammad is doing it for others now. And perhaps one day, one of those people will do the same for someone Mohammad will never even meet.

Discover. Grow. Pass it on.