However, experience had taught him with hard-learned lessons that even a simple problem could quickly escalate into a major crisis if left unattended.

It seems to have been, they say, a hard-learned lesson in humility.

He could only follow their lead, hoping that their hard-learned lessons might in turn teach him some answer to the local perils.

Still, the withdrawal leaves China Inc. with some hard-learned lessons.

But she sang each phrase as if it were a hard-learned lesson in mimicry.

At this point, though, we should not forget the hard-learned lesson that an evolutionary argument is not the same as a developmental one.

And I pass on that hard-learned lesson.

The hard-learned lesson: She should have bought the collision damage waiver.

When he called the trash management system "ultimately unsustainable," he was speaking from hard-learned lessons.

And this debacle was a hard-learned lesson about the pointlessness of softer emotions.