Alan Mayfield had it made. After retiring in his early 50s, he had installed himself in Desert Mountain, the renowned private golfing community in Scottsdale, Ariz. The most pressing decision he faced each morning was choosing which of Desert Mountain's six Jack Nicklaus-designed courses he would play that day.  Yet Mayfield was restless. "There are people who retire and just golf out their lives," he says. "But I need and want to be doing something that has more value than just goofing off all the time."  Having made his pile as a software consultant, Mayfield no longer has to work for a living. Having never married, he has no children or grandchildren to occupy his time. He enjoys golf but feels there should be more to life than knocking a little ball into a hole day after day. Yet there he was in Desert Mountain, the golf Mecca par excellence. He needed a new plan.  That was no problem for Mayfield, for whom new plans are something of a specialty. He built his career on a series of well-timed transitions--including the one that brought him to the U.S. from his native England.  Born in 1950, Mayfield grew up in a little town near Cambridge. In 1972 he graduated from the University of Salford with a degree in chemistry. "I expected to be a chemist and do research," he says. "I decided it wasn't for me and moved on."  That was Transition No. 1: from chemistry to a marketing job with Carrier, the air-conditioner and refrigeration company. Joining Carrier led to another major transition when the company transferred Mayfield across the Atlantic to its headquarters in Syracuse, N.Y. Then followed Transition No. 3: He shifted within Carrier from marketing to information technology. By 1980 he had pulled off Transition No. 4, leaving Carrier to become a management consultant specializing in software development.  For the next two decades, Mayfield prospered as a consultant, with clients such as NCR (nyse: NCR - news - people ) and the U.S. Army and Air Force. The transitions kept coming as he segued from one client to the next. By 2000, he was living in Dallas and working under contract for GTE. Then GTE was acquired by Verizon (nyse: VZ - news - people ), which was Mayfield's cue to begin thinking about his next move.  He had enjoyed being a consultant but found that he was ready to leave it behind. "The intensity of the projects didn't leave a lot of time for life," he says. Having done well financially, he was in a position to step off the merry-go-round and embrace the life of leisure. By 2002 he had engineered another major transition, from Dallas to Desert Mountain.  Mayfield did not spend all his time on the golf course. A certified scuba instructor, he flew off to the tropics periodically to teach diving, "mostly for fun." And during the winters he spent a lot of time at Beaver Creek Ski Resort in Colorado, where he owned a condo. Still, Mayfield within a few years was ready for yet another transition. He had found that there is such a thing as too much leisure.  The solution grew out of the things he already was doing. Thanks to his experience as a diving instructor, he knew that he enjoyed teaching. Meanwhile, he found himself spending more and more time on the slopes at Beaver Creek. Why not teach skiing too?  Mayfield had begun skiing three decades earlier on a rope-tow hill near Syracuse. Having owned his Beaver Creek condo since 1991, he was quite familiar with the resort's ski school. By late 2006, at the age of 56, he had become a certified ski instructor. That winter he started giving lessons. "With skiing," he says, "age was totally irrelevant."  He sold his Desert Mountain home and made Beaver Creek his base. The resort is owned by Vail Resorts (nyse: MTN - news - people ) and located near Vail in the heart of the Colorado Rockies. "It's quite an idyllic place," he says. "It's breathtaking."  Mayfield still plays plenty of golf, and each spring he still jets off to teach scuba diving in various exotic locales. But being a ski instructor has added balance to his life by making him feel more useful. "This is my third season," he says. "I have to say I love it."  Like many people, Mayfield over the years had occasionally fantasized about being a ski bum. "Now I am one," he says. "It's like a second life, and it's really a lot of fun."  Click Here For More: Second Acts
Alan Mayfield retired to the golf course, but it didn't take. So he went back to work--as a ski bum.