We empirically investigate the impact of successful goal achievement on future effort to at-tain the next goal in a recurring goal framework. We use data from a popular German Ques-tion & Answer community where goals are represented in the form of badges. Our findings indicate that after successful badge achievement users increase their subsequent effort to attain the next badge, but only as long as badges represent a challenge to the user. The key driver for this behavior, according to our analysis, appears to be self-learning.
