When I was still a newbie to crypto many people told me to keep holding and that's all I did for many years and in the end I ended up with many dead coins, whenever I keep seeing people talking about patience as if it's the only thing a newbie need I always shake my head, the fact is you need more than patience to get good results from projects, having patience sometimes will get you nothing
It always depends on what you are trying to achieve with your crypto investment. If you want to have a chance to make 500$ into 50.000 $ without much effort, then the best thing would be to invest your 500$ into 1 or more solid crypto projects and then just wait. In this case you really need patience to not cash out to early or sell off once the prices are dropping.
If you want to make the absolut maximum out of your initial 500$ investment then you need to be a very active trader, buy the rumor sell the news, listen to trends, be active on twitter and telegram to be informed and so on. That's much more effort but also has the potential of making way more money compared to simple hodling. It also creates more opportunity for wrong decisions though.