If you like a person you say ’let’s go into business together.’ Man is a social animal after all, but such partnerships are fraught with danger.

The remark cautions against confusing personal affinity with business compatibility. Tracy points to a common impulse—because humans are social, we want to formalize friendship through shared ventures—but warns that partnership adds structural pressures (money, authority, risk, unequal effort) that can quickly strain relationships. The “danger” is not sociability itself but the mismatch between emotional trust and the hard requirements of governance: clear roles, decision rights, exit terms, and accountability. Implicitly, the quote advocates professional due diligence and explicit agreements even when partners genuinely like each other, because goodwill alone rarely resolves conflict when incentives diverge.