In Java 8, you can use the Stream.findFirst() method to get the first element of Stream in Java. This is a terminal operation and is often used after applying several intermediate operations e.g. filter, mapping, flattening, etc. For example, if you have a List of String and you want to find the first String whose length is greater than 10, you can use the findFirst() method along with stream() and filter() to get that String. The stream() method gets the Stream from a List, which then allows you to apply several useful methods defined in the java.util.Stream class like filter(), map(), flatMap() etc.