"hard-won success" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when referring to something that has been achieved through a lot of effort and work. For example, "The team celebrated their hard-won success in the championship game."
Stable inflation has been a hard-won success, and one that has paid significant dividends in emerging markets.
Lorraine Gariboldi, executive director of the Deer Park center, counts Ms. Webb's case as a hard-won success.
The hard-won success that followed is not nearly as mysterious to him: it was worked for; it was earned.
A local boy, Thomas Bell, celebrated this hard-won success in his autobiographical 1941 novel "Out of This Furnace".
It has been suggested that Mr. Soderbergh, after all his hard-won success, is biting the hand that feeds him.
The anchoring of inflation expectations is a hard-won success that has been achieved over the course of three decades, and this stability cannot be taken for granted.
Instead of triumphantly conducting the yearly gathering of shareholders of Gazprom, Russia's gas monopoly, after a year of hard-won successes, the chief executive of the company never showed up.
"These are hard-won successes for an industry that has innovated, battled and transformed itself over a decade.
These hard-won successes are profiled in Pew's new report, "The Law That's Saving American Fisheries: The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act".
Can the new generation of senior leaders forge ahead with political liberalization in a way that is acceptable within the party system and does not jeopardize China's hard-won economic success?
Tom Brokaw's argument on the intellectual non-achievements of the presidential candidates and others (Op-Ed, April 3) may have the unintended and disappointing effect of trivializing the hard-won academic success of American college students and of devaluing education at a time when America can ill afford such commentary by respected national figures.
