Inspiring text messages might help push the success agenda a bit in life, except that they do not improve one's academic performance in school, says Roland Fryer, an economist at Harvard University, who arrived at the conclusion after studying roughly 2,000 state high school students in Oklahoma City.

For the experiment, the students were provided with free mobile phones to receive daily messages cheering them to continue their education and study for exams. The messages were written by an award-winning advertising agency, Droga5.

The texts were sent to sixth and seventh grade students, aged 12-13, at 6pm every day including weekends.

At the end of the nine month field study, a majority of them paid close attention to the messages by answering correctly to a subsequent quiz on the messages, but the messages failed to alter high school students' academic outcomes or attendance, 'there was no measurable increase in educational attainment or achievement.'

Fryer said that the inspiring text messages did change their opinions about college education and forced them to acknowledge that working hard and earning good grades in school is beneficial.

"People don't look down on someone for being too educated," stated one text, while another warned: "High school dropouts are more than three times as likely to be unemployed as college graduates."

Fryer estimates that the reason why the messages couldn't enhance students' academic results was because the students only had a vague idea on how to increase their productivity once they had been inspirited.

"In this scenario ... students put in more effort, but the effort was not effective at producing test scores given their lack of knowledge of how to translate effort into output," Fryer said.