The Position function returns a List of positions. This is because an element might be found in multiple locations on a list.

Position is very often used with First or Last to get the first or last element out of a list.

First[Position[....]]

This is effectively the same code as posted above.

Like Sean mentioned you can use First[Position[...]] or FirstPosition[...] to get the first position of what you look for.

To get element from result, you could do:

p = FirstPosition[{a, b, a, a, b, c, b}, b]

Extract[{a, b, a, a, b, c, b}, p]

or

{a, b, a, a, b, c, b}[[First[p]]]