This is a preparatory lecture for the series of talks that will be given the following week. We will give definitions and examples of Lefschetz fibrations, open book decompositions, symplectic and contact structures on 3- and 4-manifolds, respectively. Several main results regarding these concepts, as well as some associated concepts like convexity will be discussed briefly. Special emphasis will be given to demonstrate the interplay between all these structures, and Stein manifolds will be discussed as a motivating example.