No, I am saying that you can store up to a mximum of 255 characters in a text field. "Jason" is going to be stored as 5 characters while "Jas" will only be stored as 3 characters. Maybe this will help:

Field MyField is a text field with a max length of 255. I store the word "banana" in this field. There is now 6 characters stored in this field occupying 48 bits. Changing the max length to 6 does not affect the size as it is still only 48 bits. Max length only defines how many characters can be stored; it does not affect the actual size of the memory location.