I've never read anything like this "excellence pornography" but I believe: 1. A survey of such literature that examined commonalities would be far more useful. 2. The secrets of the successful are probably things successful people have internalized such that they cannot easily explicate them to others. For example, there is strong experimental evidence that in determining who gets a job given identically qualified candidates the chief variables are posture and demeanor in the interview. But I'd be no successful person would explain their success by pointing to their posture just as most unsuccessful people won't even know what it is they did wrong.

But that does not mean such tricks cannot be taught, just that you'll have to critically compare the lives of the successful to the lives of the unsuccessful (obviously with statistically significant sample sizes) in order to figure out what exactly the tricks are (you'd also need to take your raw data and control for the factors individuals cannot control). But the data gathering couldn't be done by interview or survey, you'd have to examine the lives of your subjects. This would be a gargantuan task if you wanted to look at every aspect of people's lives at once but it is easy to do give certain limited parameters (like in the interview case) and you can infer things from such limited conclusions. It would also be worth looking at the intersection of limited parameter studies (which could answer questions like whether quality or quantity is more important for getting promotions, posture vs. articulateness vs. physical appearence etc.).

Anyway here is scientifically sound list of 7 Habits of Highly Successful People: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/23BrendonLloyd.html